My friend, Grief.

Hello, my dear friend Grief.  What brings you today?  Was it when your 5 year old niece mentioned how she wishes Gabrielle was at home for her to play with?  Or was it when your 10 year old son woke up talking about a dream he had with his sister where they were at the water slides and Gabrielle was walking and her and James held hands as they walked around the pool.

Upon Gabrielle's diagnosis, I have been grieving.  At every stage of her life, I grieved so many things.  I grieved the boys not having a sister, a little girl to raise who would grow up, have babies and a family of her own, I grieved not being able to watch my only girl get married, go to high school, have friends, play sports and dance or play music.  Would she look like me?  Or would she look more like her Dad? I grieved her entire life.  I also grieved her devastating diagnosis that slowly wrapped it's ugly hands around my daughter and took her life from her.  It caused her such struggle, so much suffering and pain.  I hated every second of I-cell disease and I hated what it did to my daughter's body.  Grief became my constant companion as I grieved alongside my daughter but the greatest grief came when she died.

In the last 7 years, I have become a student of grief.  I live it everyday, I read about it and I understand the in's and out's of it, what it looks like and how very complex and mis-understood it is. Grief from child loss is exhausting, scary, confusing, debilitating and impossible to imagine unless you've lived it.  Grief comes when you don't want it to, like when your in the middle of a conversation with your child's teacher and you break down, or when your exercising at the gym and you burst into tears, or when your standing in a line up at the grocery store and a little blond girl walks by and all of a sudden you can't move.  Grief is always there.  It's my constant companion.

Grief is incredibly misunderstood and because people are unfamiliar with it, we have been judged many times over the past 4 years about the way in which we live our lives, and the decisions we make.  It's interesting though, because all decisions and choices we've made in the past 4 years have been purely survival choices as grief steers us in directions that we just cannot help.  You make plans and then the day of the event, you just can't move and need to cancel.  You don't make all of your sons soccer and hockey practices, because your just so exhausted from grief that you physically can't do it.  It's so frustrating, it sucks and it's so not fair.  There are days when I want to take my grief and tell it to ^$&%& off and leave me alone.  There are days where you just want to feel 'normal'.  I wouldn't wish this on my worst enemy.

The interesting thing about grief is that as time moves on your 'grief muscle' gets a bit stronger.  It's not that you stop grieving, it's that the muscle that carries the grief gets stronger and stronger. It bends and molds and gets shaped over time and there are times when grief visits and with this muscle you give it the biggest boot in the ass and tell it to take off.  No, not here, not now.  The show must go and on and sometimes there is no place for grief.  It's amazing really and I am fascinated by the human spirit's ability to survive.

I have learned many lessons but one of my favourites is that unless you walk a mile in someone's shoes, you have absolutely no place to judge how they choose to live their lives.  Be kind to people, spread love, help each other out as you have no idea what battle they're fighting.  Life is so hard, let's love each other, let's share out stories and listen to one another's struggles.  We're human and we'd be naive to think that we're not getting out of this life without deep scars and wounds and scratches.