March 17th - 6 months since Jimmy died, came and went just like any other day. The kids went to school, Mark puttered around the house on his day off, I worked on a SharePoint Services course. I don't know what I expected - maybe for the world to stop and recognize how much we all still hurt and miss Jim? I guess not, but something. Mom expressed her thoughts on the six-month anniversary day and they were pretty much the same.
Mark recognized something was wrong over the weekend and went out to buy me flowers. He suspected I was mad at him, but I was just grieving openly again. (I've become pretty good at hiding it - no one likes to see it, so I can see where he'd guess it was something he'd done.) The flowers were beautiful and I don't think he believed me when I told him I wasn't mad at him, I just needed a little time away from the house.
I realize death happens to families every day, but I now wonder what keeps us all from going batty with grief? My grief feels like that proverbial elephant in the room.
It's overwhelming to look at the entire elephant, and I'm afraid to even peek at the parts because I know it's an elephant in the room. As in "HOLY SHIT - there's an elephant in the room!" In the past six months, I've learned to gingerly step around my grief elephant, trying not to look it in the eye. No matter how careful I am, I still bump into it and get pretty bruised up in the process. The books I've read on grief tell me the elephant is living with me now and I've got to find a place for him. I didn't build my house to hold an elephant, especially this one. I'm not sure what to do with him, but I do know that until I stop being afraid to look at him, I'm going to keep getting bruised from the collisions.
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