There are gifts in the darkness of pain
14/6/24
It was my birthday 2 days ago. My first Birthday since Dan passed, it’s his birthday next week, and he passed the day after his birthday. I can feel all the emotion just sitting in the background, it’s coming out in me snapping in anger if something frustrates me, or just feeling on the verge of tears. My body remembers. I can’t help thinking back to what I was doing this time last year. On my birthday Mum and dad had the kids overnight, I ordered pizza and ate it while watching a movie on my laptop beside Dan, he managed to watch most of the movie with me, but had to sleep. I had lunch with two of my mates, just feeling fucked up that I was doing something “normal” like lunch with friends on my birthday, knowing my Partner and Father of my kids was going to die at any moment. Again, faced with the frankly fucked up and surreal feeling of is this real? Is this really my life? I don’t think everyone has to experience extreme trauma, but obviously it has a huge impact on how you see the world, on how you show up in the world, on how fucking lucky we are, how grateful for the small things that most people whinge about and take for granted, it offers a huge perspective shift that is hard to find without having some kind of big life thing affect you. I have never been more authentic than I have been since Dan passed. There are gifts in the darkness of pain.
This year I yet again find myself thinking how is this my life? When one year ago it was fucking bleak, I couldn’t see a future, I don’t even know how I was functioning and parenting my kids. And the months following his imminent death. Yet this year, while I am still grieving, while I am still healing mind, body and soul from the trauma, I have a different outlook on my experience. I no longer feel a victim. I have accepted that shit happens in life and it isn’t personal and I can grow from it or let it drown me. I feel happy, hope for the future, I laugh and feel loved, I feel joy. I am so fucking proud of myself for diving head first into my grief and just showing up messy, feeling all the feelings and emotions, feeling the pain without numbing and working my way through it – and those of you that have been here from the beginning of when I wrote my first blog post, you have seen the transformation over time. This shit isn’t an overnight thing. You get to witness real life, unfiltered, behind the scenes pain and mess and darkness and light that frankly, I don’t see anywhere. And I really fucking hope it makes you feel ok with being a messy human, with being who YOU are.
This birthday was spent doing something for me, and hanging with a friend, my Mum (dad was away for work), my kids and my amazing Partner and his daughter. Duality again of going from seeing no future, darkness and pain to all of a sudden seeing a beautiful future, feeling loved, being loved. This human life is fucking mind blowing. And I am not trying to make sense of it. I am just showing up in each moment, receiving the light after so much darkness because I know I fucking deserve it. It’s never how we expect it to be, it can be even more amazing beyond what we could have imagined. And it is still very much a mindfuck for me to accept that my life could be happy and full of love without Dan in it. But also Dan IS in it. I felt this trippy just surge of LOVING ENERGY on my birthday and intuitively I knew it was Dan.
We get so caught up when shit goes wrong, we focus on it and drown in it, but we’ve got to remember that it doesn’t last it shifts and changes and the pain does get less, I knew it would, but also I still have a long way to go. As of next week all the “firsts” will be over. I feel like it is the beginning of a new chapter. A new chapter of grief, a new chapter of my life, I felt called to unfollow some widow accounts the other day as they often keep reliving the trauma and I don’t want to do that. They are more aimed at new widows, widows going through those early days and I realised, I don’t need help and support for my grief anymore. I can manage it myself and I have Jamie by my side too. I guess I feel like i’m transitioning from “that widowed mum” to that chick who went through hell but has come out the other side with some valuable fucking life lessons and growth. My journey will absolutely be used in my work with clients in the future, I’ve been through hell and I am coming out of the other side, is it 100% over? No. It never will be. But that initial acute phase that I have written about time and time again, desperate for it to be over. I think it is officially over my friends. Fucking hell. What a ride.