Oh, Those Grief Bombs!

By Theresa Anthony, author of In Search of Gopher Hollow

Wouldn’t you think that after eleven years I’d be a master at managing my grief journey? Just my use of the word “master” is laughable. You see, there is no point in time when someone who’s endured devastating compound losses is able to master the pain. Even though I understand this intellectually, it’s hard for my heart to accept that grief can still cause s o m u c h s u f f e r i n g.

Here's what happened.

I recently purchased a new desktop (iMac) and needed to transfer all the data from the old Mac to the new one. Unfortunately, the old computer was so incapacitated that it could not perform the “migration assistant” task or recognize an external drive (long story), so this meant I had to manually move the files over via flash drives. To get an idea of the sheer volume of material I had to move, I had nearly 5,000 documents (blogs/webpages) I’d written for clients over the past decade, and that was just one small piece of the data.

Before I decommissioned the old Mac, I decided to go through the stored photos one last time to make sure I didn’t miss any treasured pics. As I scrolled through the photos, I came upon a folder and opened it up. Inside were about fifteen photos that my friend Franny had taken at my son’s graveside service all those years ago.

On that sad day, Franny had moseyed around incognito taking candid shots – no one knew she was snapping pics. I had totally forgotten about these pictures, photos that so poignantly captured the agony in our faces as we laid Blue to rest. Seeing these images again, after so many years had passed, profoundly impacted me. The grief bomb had landed squarely on my heart and detonated, so I just sat at my desk and sobbed. Even though it had been more than eleven years, on that day the pain was so raw it felt like my boy had died the prior week.

One picture in particular really got me. It was a shot of my son’s closest friends standing together there at the cemetery with expressions of pure shock and sorrow on their faces as they tried to process what was happening. These young men, all about age twenty-five at the time, were the pallbearers (along with Blue’s father). There they stood in their dark suits mourning the loss of their dear friend, someone they’d grown up with, played baseball with, gone off to college with.

Even all these years later, seeing the photos again pierced my heart. They were the concrete evidence that I really had buried my child that day, that it wasn't just a bad dream. But the pictures of our anguished faces also revealed just how deeply we loved him.

Nine months after my son's death, I lost the love of my life, Mike, who died of leukemia after his body rejected the stem cell transplant. Mike was there at the cemetery that day, and Franny captured a shot of him. There he was, his head bald from chemo, with his arms wrapped oh so tightly around me. Losing Mike so soon after my son was nothing short of devastating. This coming Sunday will be the eleventh memorial anniversary of Mike’s death, so, as I do every year at this time, I am bracing for impact.

And I'll let you in on a little secret: It isn’t true when they say that time heals all wounds. It doesn't. Some wounds are etched so deeply they become permanent scars – scars that serve as lifelong reminders of how intensely we had loved. So, although those uninvited, unexpected grief bombs will continue to level me when they hit, they do serve an important purpose - to remind me of the immense depth and capacity of my love.

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