Good Grief: Month 11

Last Christmas was the happiest of my life. This is what I wrote then:

"I have to say my reaction to this Christmas vacation surprised me over and over again. I can't remember enjoying myself so much for such an extended period of time. It was a total escape from schedules, and Rob was able to take extra days off to be home with us a lot.... I had time to play around and do whatever sounded good at the moment. And one of those was definitely to just relax at home. We all slept in every day, I read "A Thousand Splendid Suns," shopped with the girls, went to the gym together at any crazy hour of the day or night, Rob took the younger kids to the church gym to play basketball a few times, we played Bananagrams, watched movies, and ... I found out that is my version of bliss at this point in my life."



As it turned out, it was the calm before the storm.

This past Christmas was busy, last-minute, and disorganized. Rob had surgery on his elbow to repair years of volleyball wear-and-tear and couldn't lift any weight while he recovered, which meant I had to be the resident Hulk as well as the Christmas decorator/shopper/wrapper. Then, we had the two weeks of snowfall and single-digit temperatures, and our snowplow was broken. MK and her college friends came and went into the wee hours of the night/morning, so we didn't get much sleep. My grief crept closer and closer to the surface, because I was busy and avoiding it. One night about 1 a.m. I took a drive to decompress... and quickly noticed a cop following me around the dark, deserted roads. Pffffff.

But, death puts the "dang dailies" in perspective like nothing else. Big whoop I have to take the trees down and haul them into storage. During the holidays I would clear the kitchen counter every time I turned around. Oh well. I got a parking ticket before the Justin Bieber concert for parking perpendicular instead of parallel on a snowbank at the end of a dead end street. Whatever.

We're heading out of our first year of grief, and that is a big deal. Life keeps moving. Other challenges have cropped up, ones that require my full attention and a good dose of energy. Are these gifts in disguise? I find myself moving toward those challenges and away from my grief. At these times, Elle is a comfort, not the worst part of my life (now I have other worse parts of my life, ha!). She was so innocent, so happy. And I was irreplaceable to her. She needed me and trusted me like a 4-year-old does. Our relationship was frozen in a good place. That's a comfort to me.

I've also realized that just as death loses its sting when you put it in perspective, challenges that would have "devastated" me prior to this past year have lost their intimidation factor. Life is what it is. Problems are temporary. You do your best. You exercise faith. You work the problem. We're here to learn.

Dangit.