Stages of Grief

My senior year of high school, I took a Shakespeare class as an elective. I remember writing a paper on Macbeth, using the 5 stages of grief as my outline. Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, Acceptance. Experiencing grief myself, I'm finding that those stages are not sequential, they are all over the map. I feel like we hit Acceptance first. We had an overwhelming strength about things in the first two weeks following the loss. We were brokenhearted and very sad, but we both seemed to have a calming peace in our hearts and acceptance of what had happened. I truly believe that was the power of prayer and we were feeling the Holy Spirit working in us as we were processing the loss of our child, allowing our hearts to be open and accepting.

As time passed, the sadness came out more and things were just hard. I'll call that depression. We can be have a perfectly good day and then there is just a random trigger to make things sad, without warning, tears will just flow. One thing without fail though is that Wednesdays are gloomy days. For those that have experienced grief or loss, do you find that you have/had a day of the week that is just harder to get through than others? The week I returned to work, I had a coworker come by my office to give me a hug. She had gone through loss with the death of her father and had just simply said our losses are not the same but she understands grief. We talked about it a little bit and she said that Sundays were particularly hard days for her and that's when I realized I had a pattern with Wednesdays and that it is normal to have a day that is more difficult than others.

Though I went to the doctor on a Tuesday to discover that we had lost Hudson, he was born on a Wednesday, and his most recent due date was set on a Wednesday. Before our loss, on Wednesday mornings before getting out of bed, I would excitedly look at my Ovia Pregnancy App and it would tell me what size he was that week, how he was growing/changing, and what was happening with my body. Now, instead of counting 34 weeks, 35 weeks, 36 weeks, etc. I'm counting how many weeks he's been gone or had we been able to deliver him alive at that time, how old he would be.

I had a particularly hard day this past Wednesday. I came into work with sunglasses on to cover up tear stained eyes. I guess I felt like being mean to myself and had looked at Facebook that morning only to see more announcements of the child-bearing type. My work was so supportive and thoughtful when I came back. They knew I would have hard days so they added a curtain to the window next to the office door so that I could close it for full privacy when needed. That morning, I closed the curtain and shut my door. Shortly after, my boss tapped at the door. I could see her shoes at the bottom of the window that wasn't covered. I opened it for her and she knew I had been crying and just gave me a hug. I blurted out to her that I was just mad. I was mad to keep seeing all of these things and it's not fair. She told me I should be mad and not to feel bad about the way I feel, she was glad that I was mad.

Next Wednesday, July 15 is his revised due date. Our first due date calculated was July 18 and that is what we marked on every calendar we owned, then at some point in the second trimester, it was moved up three days to July 15. Both dates register to us as a Hudson Day. In a perfect world, somewhere between those days, our sweet baby would have arrived as science predicted. Even now, Max and I ask ourselves, would he be with us yet had this not happened, or would we still be waiting?

Last night, Max and I made one of our favorite salmon dishes and enjoyed a quiet evening at home. We were watching Grand Budapest Hotel and between sips of sauvignon blanc, I said out loud, "this would have been our last weekend, just the two of us." He said he had been thinking about that earlier in the day, too. Today I woke up crying. I fought back tears while on a long walk with Max and pup. I sat in his rocker, clutching that lamb with tears streaming down my face. I am just in a funk. I am supposed to go to a birthday party today that I put together for a close friend, but I can't fathom being around people. Many of the people going are those I haven't seen yet since our loss. I am just exhausted of putting on a smile and brave face to feign that we are fine and normal.

Within the first two weeks after loss, I had told myself over and over again, almost as though I was trying to ingrain it in my mind, that I don't want our joy for others to be robbed. That mantra didn't work because right now, I just can't be happy for those that are expecting. Every pregnancy announcement makes my stomach hurt. Every time I see a gender announcement, I am infuriated to see someone else who will welcome a baby boy and have a quick sense of relief to see when it is a baby girl. All the pictures announcing a birth of a healthy baby and happy parents makes me cry and then boil. I know it's terrible, I know that, but that's just where I am right now. I would NEVER wish this experience on ANYONE but I don't understand why everyone else around us is living out the joy of happy pregnancies and delivering their perfect, living babies but we lost Hudson and have to go through this nightmare.

I see little boys in pictures, on the street, in the grocery store - doesn't matter what age - and my heart just aches wishing I'd be able to see my Hudson at that age someday, but I never will. As I sit here typing in my office at home, I hear my neighbor's three year old son in the backyard gleefully shrieking "mommy! daddy!" as they do yard work and it's another dagger to the heart, followed by clenching teeth and a scowl. I just don't want to see or be around it at all. I don't want to be jealous of what everyone around us has - a growing family - but I am finding that to be the case.

Friends, I think this would be called reaching the anger phase of grief and I apologize. This is a phase I can't wait to come out of because I've never felt less like myself. How do we become okay with it again and allow our hearts not to be saddened or worse, hardened, when we see a little one that should have been around the same age as Hudson? How do we rejoice with several of our close friends and family members, who we love dearly, that announce their pregnancies or birth their children in the coming months? How do we break past the anger to find that peace and acceptance again?

Disclaimer: right now, I write this just for me. When I hit publish it's a release and I share it with women that are going through this same kind of loss. We are in a sisterhood no one wants to be a member of, but once you are, it is a support system like no other. Our words help each other, and they help us navigate how we feel.  

Outside of those women, few people know about this blog and I don't know when/if that will change. But if you are one of those friends expecting, know we love you. Know we are happy for you deep in our hearts. Right now it's just hard to break past the pain and hurt to allow that happiness for you to be the main emotion and I am so sorry for that. We will get there again someday.