I Can Still Laugh

I work with an extraordinary woman who wrote a book with this title, using her personal and clinical experiences with individuals who reveal their personal struggles with Alzheimer’s and other forms of dementia. Remarkably, every one of them finds ways to minimize the effects of their illness and continue to live exciting, active lives. Their mission is to make themselves – and everyone else around them – forget the notion that life ends with a diagnosis. The brave individuals of these stories are proving that life goes on and all is not lost because, in their words, “I can still laugh.”

In my professional life, I am in Development and Fundraising for a non-profit organization, a brain research center and its translational arm to provide research-based programs to the public. The print above is something I had made for one of my donors. It is for a family that has walked a road of grief after a mother and a wife had been diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. Because of that, this family has been instrumental in providing the funding to create a support group that our Center is able to offer to families who have experienced the diagnosis of Mild Cognitive Impairment and Alzheimer's. I grew up going to church with the precious young woman who made this for me, a teacher who has this calligraphy print business as well. She took the above picture of the print and posted it to social media on a day that I was weighing my options on my grief battle and could have chosen to stay in bed. Max was traveling, I had felt a little under the weather probably from our holiday travels coupled with the aftermath of hitting the seven month mark without Hudson. I had nothing that would require me to leave the house that day so I was laying in bed planning to surrender to my grief because sometimes you need to.

In the first few months following loss, getting out of bed wasn't the problem. I could wake up and start a new day, but as the day wore on, it became harder to function. Starting in the fall, that reversed and it became hard to want to get out of bed to start a new day. As I worked on lifting out of my grief, waking up in the morning presented me with a choice. I could lay there and have a pep talk with myself, to make the choice of having a good day or I could let my mood/emotions weigh me down. Those who understand grief or depression know what I'm talking about. You can choose to try to have a good day and that choice may prevail and it may not, but you've tried. Other days you are tired. You are exhausted from faking it, from camouflaging your true feelings and sometimes it is so much easier to succumb to the grief. When you surrender to it, you take on a mood that you don't care about what is going on around you, you don't want to make an effort at all. You can be unpleasant. If you don't have to leave the house, you don't. If you do have to be a functioning member of society that day, you go through the motions until you can be back in solitude and the comfort of home.

On this particular morning, I was having an internal debate about what kind of day I was going to have. I was leaning toward the surrender. I laid in bed on my phone, scrolling social media, torturing myself with pictures of little ones enjoying the holidays, and then I saw this picture.

I smiled.

My colleague's book title meant something new to me. There is a future with my firstborn, my son, that I will never have. An entire life that would have been different had he been in it. A life he didn't get to live, meaning a life we didn't get to experience in its rightful form. That is all taken from us, abruptly and without warning. There is an ever-present sadness inside because of it.

However, there's something you need to know. There are good days. Lately, there have been many more consecutive good days than bad. In fact, December was the first month since our loss that I didn't say at the end of it, okay, now I've hit rock bottom, this was my worst month. November was my worst month to date. After hitting the six month mark at the end of November, I knew December had the potential to be even worse because of all things Christmas and the memories from the year before as we started to share with people that we were pregnant, and now we didn't have a baby and we weren't pregnant again despite all attempts. We had a plan for December and I worked hard to lift out as much as I could while still doing what I felt comfortable with in the confines of my own grief, going back to grief counseling to work through the ugly feelings that won't go away. I still had some really tough times, but the good days have started to outnumber the bad.

The truth about my grief is that there has yet to be a day in the last 224 days that I have not cried. And I'm not talking about just a tear here or there, I mean a full-on-make-up-running-snot-everywhere-loud-sob-ugly-cry. But also, there has not been a day in the last 224 days that I have not laughed, or at the very least, smiled. The place I write from is the most vulnerable part of me, one that is always hurting, but it isn't the way I walk through life at all times. When I write, I tap into that for an expression of honesty and raw emotion from the heart of a grieving mother. However, our/my life is not always a state of loom and doom.
 
As I reflect on the previous year, I think about how just as 2015 started so did our second trimester. We spent last New Year's Eve in Ireland and I taught the bartenders to make a Shirley Temple (or Kiddie Cocktail) that I cheers'd to a new year with surrounded by dear friends. I remember Max and I walking home after the pub and talking about what this new year was going to be like for us, how much excitement we had as expecting parents. We were bracing ourselves for a big life change but this was not the change we had anticipated.

I spent the first half of 2015 happier than ever. It was exciting, it was new, it was hopeful, it was fun. I spent the second half of 2015 in a deep pit of despair.

Now we are in the first week of a new year. For those wrestling with loss, it is never a fresh start, a clean slate or a new beginning. It is just entering a new year of life phases without the one who is missing. New milestones you have to overcome, more hurdles to get over, more reminders of what is lost. Personally, I wasn't ready because I didn't want to leave Hudson behind in 2015. I wanted to leave the catastrophic aftermath of the loss there, the ugly parts of it, but not all of it. So this year I did something I have never done. For the first time that I can recall, I have no plans for the new year. No goals, no resolutions, no plans. We are going to finish what we started in December, the clomid, the testing. I'm on day 3 of an all Paleo diet because of how it is linked to balancing hormones and helping fertility. I am doing acupuncture and continuing with my grief counseling again. However, after this month, it is a blank page and I have no plans for what we will do next. It's not up to me, I am not in control. Coming to grips with that is almost painfully hard for me and against my DNA, but it's also a bit of a relief because I am exhausted of trying to control things that are so blatantly out of my control.

I will have an outlook though. I will have a mantra. I will generalize the way I feel about 2016 and that is that grief cannot take it all away. I can scream to the top of my lungs a big F you to the ugliness of grief, because here's the thing: I can still laugh and I intend to. Here's to making this year about laughter whether you are down in the trenches, crawling out of it, you have made it to the other side or you are watching as someone you love goes through it. I wish you all rich blessings and that you are able to seek happiness in all things, whenever you can, and wherever you are on your life journey.

Here's to making this a year of laughter, from my grieving heart to yours.