This post originally started as a post just about George, and then it morphed. Now it’s about my grief for both Sara and George, how they’re very different types of grief. I’ve just been really heavy with grief lately – it almost feels like it is getting worse. Trying to work through all of this at the same time just gets overwhelming. Life in general is just really overwhelming right now…
I know I write mostly about Sara – she was my world, my light, my love, my everything for four years. I feel her loss so deeply with every moment. I’m not exaggerating – it’s really every moment. I may be functioning and doing what I need to do, but there is ALWAYS a part of me that is feeling her loss.
It’s almost like my world has been flooded with water, with unpredictable tides. Sometimes the water is only ankle deep – I’m aware that it is there, but it doesn’t impede my mobility much. When the water rises to mid-calf, I notice it more and have to exert more effort to do what I need to do. Sometimes it rises up to my knees, sometimes to my waist… and then there are days where I’m literally just trying to keep my head above the waters of my grief.
When I grieve for Sara, I grieve who she was and who we were together, who I was when I was with her. I grieve our life together – what we had and what we were planning. I am trying to cope with a Sara-shaped hole left in my world.
My grief for George is different. He was a part of our lives for 19 1/2 weeks. This was enough time to build up so many beautiful dreams about who he would become, and what we would be like as a family. Sara and I bonded with the little being that was growing within me, who we only learned to be George after he was gone. Although I do grieve George, as that little being we had bonded with, my grief and sadness around him are more focused on missing what should have been, rather than what was.
I feel like I have one foot in the world of parenthood, and one foot out. We share some experiences with some other parents – we conceived and gestated a child, and went through labor & delivery. But that’s where our experiences with George ends. We didn’t get to hear his cry or take him home from the hospital. We didn’t get to struggle installing the car seat for the first time. We didn’t get to experience the frustration of sleepless nights with a newborn, or fretting over whether he is eating enough or growing enough. I’m so sad that I will never get to see his unique personality develop.
I am a parent, but I have little in common with most parents. I don’t know how my parental identity fits into the world, and this compounds my grief. It’s not supposed to be this complicated, but my life is now one in which I dread the question “do you have kids”? I like people to know about George – he was our beautiful little boy… but some days I just can’t deal with other people’s reactions.
This post feels a little wandering, a little directionless, but I suppose that’s what grief feels like so much of the time. I just have to keep going, one breath, one post, one day at a time.