Grief

Grief is such a crazy word.  It means so many things to so many people.  It can be used as a remonstrance-  " don't give me grief."  It has been stereotyped in literature, "the grieving widow."  However, one common phrase I haven't decided about yet is, "good grief!"  Is grief good?  It sure doesn't feel like it.  Over the past month I have experienced terrible grief.  Some of you will understand, and others of you will think I'm silly.  But it was very real for me and very painful.  Here is my story.  The first part is a little PG rated.

I grieve the loss of my breasts.  I miss them.  They are gone forever, amputated, removed.  I know eventually they will be fully reconstructed, but they will not be the same.  When I express this to people, I often get the response, "What's the problem?  You'll get new ones and they'll be great!"  They don't understand that I have lost a part of me. The "great new ones"  won't have any feeling or any response.  They will be for aesthetic purposes only.  People don't understand that.  Writing about it even now makes me cry- I'm typing through tears.  It is a LOSS- it's not an opportunity.  I didn't choose this, and I would much prefer to keep the body God gave me.

I'm grieving other things that are gone forever that I can't really write about on this public blog.

While trying to process all this, our beloved cat Magnolia died of kidney failure.  She was 14, and I had had her for 13 years.  Darrin and I took her to the emergency vet, and we had to put her down.  I sobbed so hard I'm sure the whole clinic could hear me.  She was such a loving little cat, and so active- we forgot she was so old, so it was a doubly hard blow.  She comforted me so much after my surgeries.  She absolutely adored Andy- she always followed him around and he had to do an elaborate scheme to get into his room at night without her.  She used to meet us at the door every time we came home. She was so precious to all of us.  I told Darrin I didn't think I could bear it if one of the cats died while I was dealing with cancer. She died one year to the day that I started chemo.   We had a funeral for her and Darrin read from the Book of Common Prayer.  We all cried together.  We put a little stone marker and planted some flowers on her grave.  She was part of our family, and now she is gone.

I don't know why God is choosing to allow all this grief.  It is sometimes overwhelming.  Sometimes it causes panic attacks.  Sometimes I think I'll never get over it, and other days I do great.

So- is grief 'good'?  I think so, actually.  It is a mechanism God has given us to process events and loss in our lives.  There are stages of grief, and I find myself moving between them regularly.  But there is the key word- moving.  I'm not standing still- mired in my grief.  I'm moving through it.  Sometimes I feel like I am crawling through it, but I'm still moving.  It hurts like heck, but it is a healing hurt, like debriding a wound.  Or like Eustace in The Voyage of the Dawn Treader,  peeling away the dragon skin to reveal the raw, new Eustace.  Through all this I think there will be a new, raw Robin- one who has survived, and will thrive again.  Because God is good, and that is what He does.