Today is Weston's six month birthday. It has been a hard day. There really is not much to say about it besides the obvious: observing your baby's first half-year without your baby is just really wrong.
On a more personal note, today was discouraging in that it has been almost six months since Weston's death, and I don't feel any better than I did back in September. That is when I figure I emerged from shock into true mourning. I am still scared to go out in groups, kids' events petrify me, unexpectedly seeing baby boys is a disaster, and I have mastered the art of avoiding people I know when I see them in public. (Well, I'm not so sure about that last one. Maybe it's painfully obvious that I'm trying to avoid them. If I have avoided you while out and about, I apologize. It's nothing personal; I simply am tired of crying in public.) And that does not even address everything going on (or not) in my heart, soul and mind.
Also, we tend to mark time in increments of years and half-years. I am sure that there are people out there who will think a half-year is long enough to "get over" losing Weston, so I'm bracing myself for hurtful comments to start/pick up in the next month or so.
So, on to the title of this post. Movie night with my husband sounds pretty innocuous, right? Nope. Not anymore.
Before we had kids, Shannon and I went to the movies all the time. After Caroline was born, we got a Netflix subscription and watched at least one movie every weekend. In other words, WE LOVE MOVIES.
Since Weston died, I have had absolutely no desire to watch a movie. I didn't overthink it, but I figured it was simply because I have no attention span anymore. We went to one movie about a month or two after Weston died. It was a good one by the critics' standards (The Master), but it left me feeling just meh. And (surprise!) my mind kept wandering. Same with Moonrise Kingdom, which I watched at home.
Shannon's sister offered to watch Caroline so we could go out Saturday night. (Thanks, M!) We decided to see a movie. I wondered if my desire to go to a movie was a sign that my attention span is returning. We chose Silver Linings Playbook.
The movie got excellent reviews. I had seen the previews, and it looked poignant yet funny. I knew it was about a mentally ill guy who meets a woman whose husband DIED, but for some crazy reason the plot did not deter me from wanting to see it.
Disaster. And I'm not referring to my attention span. The movie was very good by all accounts, but it was very difficult to watch. There were some really funny parts, but I just cried while the rest of the very full theater was laughing. It wasn't even that the movie reminded me of Weston and the magnitude of my loss. It was just that these two people were struggling in different ways for different reasons, and they were constantly misunderstood by everyone. Before Weston, I would have just laughed along with the rest of the theater (and it WAS funny). Now I think about how I could relate to their feelings of loneliness. My innocence is gone. In fact, I was ruminating about how easy it would be to be an actor now: all I would have to do is go to that all-too-accessible sad, lonely place in my head, and I could play any tragic heroine...or villain.
SMALL SPOILER ALERT: the movie has a happy ending. When the credits started rolling, Weston popped back into my head immediately, reminding me of my eternal sadness. It was so unfair that the people in the movie got their happy ending. Sadness is so much worse when starkly contrasted with bliss. We didn't even make it out of the theater before I was crying again.
Weston's death has touched every part of my life: even something as normal as seeing a romantic comedy with my husband is an emotional timebomb. Movies are no longer an escape. Instead, they are a magnifier of all the sadness in my life. When the screen goes dark at the end of the movie, I am left, quite literally, with a silent, gaping hole. The hole in my heart.
It's not true that I'm always thinking of [Weston]. Work and conversation make that impossible. But the times when I'm not are perhaps my worst. For then, though I have forgotten the reason, there is spread over everything a vague sense of wrongness, of something amiss...What's wrong with the world to make it so flat, shabby, worn-out looking? Then I remember...Will there come a time when I no longer ask why the world is like a mean street, because I shall take the squalor as normal?
~C.S. Lewis, A Grief Observed at 35-36
Shauna, my identical twin sister died 38 and a half years ago, when we were four weeks old, and my parents still mourn her loss. Their grief is no longer raw, but it is still there, and July 23 is a bad, bad day -- every year. It will take a long time, but one day, you will find there are more good feelings than bad. People who think six months or one year will just turn off grief like a faucet are morons. Hang in there. It will get better, albeit slowly. My friends who lost their two-month old son to SIDS twelve years ago have gone on to have three more children, but those kids cannot replace that first precious child. They fondly remember him all the time but still grieve his loss.
ReplyDeleteI just saw your picture in the Baylor Magazine. My daughter died 5 years ago. I can tell you that is does get easier to live with your loss. A program called GriefShare really helped us understand the grieving process. You can go to their website (GriefShare.org) and search for a group in your area. We have led six groups through the materials so far.
ReplyDeletePress on.