In Grief, we have to go through the alphabet...

“I am not a product of my circumstances. I am a product of my decisions.” 

~Stephen Covey

Grief. It changes you in ways you never imagined.

Before my loss, I was me. Today I am somebody else. When it happened, I felt like a child protesting sleep before nap time. I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna, I don’t wanna.

Maybe it wasn’t real. If I didn’t look at it, it might go away.

Except it wouldn’t.

When faced with grief, we are not prepared for the devastation. I don’t know if the advanced warning would help, but something about the unexpectedness feels like even more of injustice, no matter if we see it coming or not.

When I lost my oldest son, my life was ripped in half, and I felt a total loss of control of body and mind. I didn’t recognize myself. My brain felt like it was floating away and I couldn’t remember details.

I couldn’t sleep or eat.

But the pain I will never forget. A deep, searing kind that transcended anything physical.

I questioned my skills and capability. The grief made me forgetful, emotional, angry, sad, empty, and scared.

I frequently questioned my reality. I wondered if everything was always just a mirage in my head. Perhaps I was never married. It had to be a dream, or maybe a cruel trick, and now the rug was pulled out from beneath my feet.

In the days after my son passed away, his twin was walking sadly around the house. I knew in my gut what choice I had to make. For her. For me. For all of us.

On a whim I grabbed a pen and paper and scribbled this down:

We have two choices: 1) Lay down and crumble, or 2) Get up, do great things, and make Seth proud.

I circled the second option.

I knew I had to channel everything inside of me to convey to her and Seth's other siblings that we would be okay, even if I wasn’t convinced of it myself. I knew I had to lead.

We didn’t choose this path.

But this was our life now, and we still have a lot of good years left to live.

Nobody prepares us for the sludge in life, but this is precisely what being human is about: the good, the bad, the painful, the happy, the sad, the everything-in-between.

We can choose to sit down and surrender to our current circumstances, or we can get up, dust ourselves off, hold our heads up high and move forward.

It will hurt.

We’ll feel wobbly at first.

But we can do it. We are capable. We are strong. We still have a lot of love inside of our hearts to do great things.

The only other option was not an option for us.

People often say that good things can happen out of the bad. I’m here to tell you that it is true.

In the horror of it all, buried in the pain and the raw emotion, there was something magical and enlightening about loss. It exposed a side of life that I never previously experienced. It’s a strange, curious feeling that shocks you to the core and simultaneously makes you realize that there is still so much more to learn and discover about life. It can’t be over yet.

Your perspective will change. Everything about your thinking will forever change.

This is good and bad.

When life doesn’t go as planned, we must hold on to the knowledge and hope that we still have choices and that we are strong enough to make them.

There is always Plan B.

Plan C.

Plan D.

Keep going to Z if you must.

Cheers.