Good Days and Bad Days – Thursday October 21th

My face crumpled and the tears started pouring out before my brain could catch up. I sat in the car crying and trying to put my finger on what the impetus was. It had been a few days- maybe more than a week- since I cried last.

I looked at the phone in my hands and I tried to catch my breath. Finally I realized that I was crying for all the ripples that came after Tommy Jr’s death. My shaken relationships, my paralyzed confidence, my feeling of being trapped and alone and wedged in all at the same time. Mostly though, it was the relationships. It’s hard to believe that people who say they love me just cannot understand what I need.

But that’s just what I think when I’m crying. When I stop crying, I know that it’s the easiest thing in the world to believe. As my wise sister-in-law pointed out, Tom and I are the only ones living every minute with this grief. Everyone else has their regular lives to go back to- just like I have done when my friends or family have suffered. It’s a fact of life. It’s the most normal thing in the world. And it can be utterly heartbreaking.

But before we all get too sad, I have to remind myself of the people who have been wonderful. The people who always answer their phones and say just the thing I needed to hear. I’m so lucky and grateful to have those people- and so many of them- in my life. It sucks that the crying jags are so exhausting and intense, but the good days are just even and quiet and good. They’re not explosive, they don’t leave physical reminders. They just pass in and out of the bad days like little ghosts. I have to write it down sometimes just to remind myself I have them (and I have them more and more often). I wish the good days were as wild and consuming as the bad days.