I think one of the things that no one understands until they themselves live through a totally traumatic experience is that there is a fog that settles over you. It’s almost like when you are small and jump into a pool and open your eyes. All of your senses are present, but everything else is dull and muffled. It’s all very real, but it’s also very filtered…foggy.
That is what the aftermath of trauma feels like. I think it is even worse when you continue to live in the same place where that trauma happened. Everything around you has stayed the same, but there is a big hole where the hand of God came into your life and ripped something big away. Well-meaning people come in and want to tell you all that you have to do, but that’s the worst thing you can do to someone who is traumatized. People need to learn that their opinions aren’t fact and what is more helpful is to just shut up for a long time because what comes after the initial trauma is the heaviest grief. The old metaphor of grief being like an ocean is so very real. Only that ocean of grief then sucks you into a tunnel. It’s a dark tunnel that you feel like you’re looking up from. You’re at the bottom, things are less muffled you’re feeling more again, but it’s still not the same as before so you keep squinting and looking up at the light of hope and remember that while your husband’s life ended, your journey has not and there is more to come.
You start to begin your life again. You start dating again. You start building new friendships. You start thinking about what life is going to look like without your husband who in end turned out to not be the life partner you thought you had. I still can’t tell you what the bigger betrayal is when I look back on my life– that one relationship you thought was going to be something when you were young and dumb or your husband choosing not to take care of himself and die at 43 years old totally abandoning you in a life that sets you up for one of the loneliest lives as a single mom of three kids. Anger begins to bubble.
Your anger turns into making your space your own again. Maybe it’s small little things like painting and clearing spaces. You get rid of their stuff, saving things for your children that in 20 years from now they too will probably throw into the garbage but at that point it will be their choice to have done it. You think life is moving forward again. Things are good.
Only then your little raft begins to crumble because these were merely bridges in the end. And you plunge back into grief again, but it’s a new grief. The grief of things not working out which in turn brings a clarity with it that you needed. The clarity over people and situations that for your entire life you tolerated their behavior, never speaking up because there would never be any talking, there would just be how you were the problem. Only with clarity you see that you never were, but that keeping your mouth shut to keep the peace was in fact a trauma response in and of itself. Then suddenly your voice erupts quite loudly and to your surprise people begin to shut up.
And you begin to face wrapping up the last of your life from before. This has been an entire series of events in my recent life, but the big one was finally addressing the dogs that I had with Phil. After another blow out fight with my dad about it, I realized that I had been holding onto the dogs because the kids got them with their dad and it was Phil who named them, one of the last things he did with us. And then on the morning that he died, he had died taking the dogs out that morning. It was all so wrapped up in that Saturday and the months before he died, but it took me this long to realize it. To everyone else it’s so easy oh, just start over, but starting over even with the dogs is a journey. A very personal one and the answer isn’t always just to do it to make your life easier. Sometimes, what you need is to hold onto something until you’re ready to let it go.
Katherine Kuzma-Beck 