The process of grief is an emotional roller coaster. You experience sorrow, fear, anger, guilt, relief, denial, numbness, frustration, anxiety, often in rapid succession. And sometimes you feel multiple feelings at the same time. I have reached a stage of constant mixed feelings.
I am approaching four months since my husband passed away, and I feel like to some degree my emotions have begun to stabilize. The grief is still there, a constant undercurrent, but it is less raw. I have learned to manage it, to push it aside when I need to deal with practical issues, and to let it loose at an appropriate moment when I need a release. But what is still hard to manage are the constantly conflicting feelings.
I think this is part of the "guilt" portion of the Kubler-Ross stages of grief. I am starting to learn to live life without him, and I feel like I shouldn't be able to do that. But at the same time, I am struggling to learn to live life without him, and I feel like I should be able to do that. I rejoice at my independence but I feel guilty about my independence. It's a conflict between knowing in my head that it's okay to be okay while at the same time feeling in my heart that I should never be able to be okay again. It's confusing, it's frustrating, and it's exhausting.
Any time I think about changing anything about our lives or making a decision he might not have made, whether it's cutting my hair or decorating the house differently for the holidays or taking a trip or letting my daughter dye her hair or letting my son go to a rap concert, I feel like I'm betraying him in a way. Should I be respecting his opinion even if he isn't here to express it? Do I have a responsibility to honor his wishes even after his death? Or does taking on the role of father as well as mother give me permission to make decisions for our household completely on my own, without trying to guess what he would have done? The emotional weight of every decision, large or small, is intensified a hundredfold.
But the bottom line is that he's not here, and I am. I'm the one making the decisions, I'm the one running the show, whether I want to or not. And all I can do is the best I can. I make my choices based on what I know and how I feel. I listen to my heart as well as my head. I look to those around me for guidance and reassurance. And I pray. A LOT.
I sometimes ask myself what he would say if he were here. I imagine how the conversation would have gone if we were discussing it together. After all, we had hundreds, probably thousands of discussions about family-related decisions over the course of our marriage. I don't always know exactly what he would have thought or said, but I do know that in the end, he would always have supported me. He was, after all, as he frequently reminded me, my Fan Club President.
And I know he still is.