I’ve read that when you are grieving it can take 18 to 24
months (MONTHS) for sleeping and eating patterns to return back to normal. I
find that to be an interesting data point. And is that an estimation? Do you
take all people that are grieving, throw them into a bucket, take a poll of
raising hands and come up with 18 to 24 months? Does it matter what relationship
you are to the person who died? Was this a scientific study? Did someone send
out a survey? Or maybe some bearded man with a clip board followed you around for hours
on end from meal time to snack time, table to table, and again stood at the
foot of your bed counting the fretting and rolling patterns of your not
sleeping. Maybe they weren’t sleeping because of said tall bearded man in glasses
standing in the dark scrawling notes on a note pad? Call me crazy. That
intrigues me, 18 to 24 months of awkward, or at least “off your normal” pattern
of eating and sleeping. I’m sure it’s true, at least for some duration of time.
Well, I know it’s true.
For me, early on, it was the sleep and the eating. I
remember the first few days after my brother’s death (if you are new to this,
my brother passed away unexpectedly a few months ago) I simply could not eat. I
could fill my plate with food and I could sit down at the table, but I could
not eat. I might be able to manage a fork full or two, but then it simply would
stop. There was not hunger. There were no stomach growls. In fact, to even see
someone else eat seemed utterly out of place. Why would anyone need to eat? (The
mind games of the subconscious have been enlightening these last 5 years since
mastectomy). This drastic transition in eating was short lived. I soon returned
to eating, obviously, but the patterns of eating were indeed different and that
lasted for a while. It was subtle, but was there and that lasted for a few
weeks into months. Eating became something you did to survive. Gone was the
enjoyment of the smells and tastes of food. The enjoyment of watching
ingredients come together into a masterpiece was obsolete. Favorite foods didn’t
carry an accolade. The entanglement of
nourishment with social interaction became untangled. Food had transition to its
organic structure intent on becoming part of mine. And there were other things,
not just food and sleep, that teetered out of balance as my world shifted on
its axis in this new state of grieving life without Andy.
While eating and sleeping habits seems to be back to normal,
though at times sleep can still be a battle on any given week, I’m finding I
still greatly struggle with maintaining motivation. Going to work every day and functioning at
the top of my game seems to be absolutely all I have to give. Anything above that is a motivation sucker. I
get home and it’s time to cook dinner and I can’t find the motivation to get
ingredients into their pot. It’s a Saturday morning and I need to get some
stuff done around the house and it takes every ounce of my power to get that task
started. Once I do get started, I seem to be good to go, but that actual
process of starting the given task is completely touch and go. And this has been going
on for 4 months now. I seem to have nothing to give to you, to the house, to
anything other than my job (and that is out of necessity) without a serious
internal power talk to get me going. This is 100% out of the normal for me. To
give you some perspective, I am a
complete go-getter at baseline. Prior to Andy’s death, I would see my to-do
list and the first thing I would do is see a list of 10 items, with plans of
tackling 2, and end up tackling 8. That is just how I work. No procrastination
in me. Not a bit. Get in there, get it done, do even more than what you have on
your list, get out, enjoy the rest of the day. Now, it is like signing up for a
root canal just to take out the trash. I have nothing left to give. And it
drives me crazy. The bathrooms need to be cleaned. The house needs to be vacuumed.
The bags need to be packed for the trip. The gifts need to be purchased. The list
needs to be made. The groceries need to be shopped. The meal needs to be
prepped. The laundry needs to be laundered. The gathering needs to be attended. Instead, I see those items and can’t find the motivation
to get it done. And when I do, I get one item done (usually that’s dinner) and
then find myself mentally spent and not wanting to do anymore. This is not the
me I know. And it’s not acceptable. Type A Sally needs Type A Sally back and
she needs her back now. I miss her. She was a delightful and productive soul
and she totally made me whole. Listen, I don’t need to over achieve, I’d settle
for simply achieving at this point in the game, because this level of perpetual
underachieving has me out of sorts, not in that it’s not ok for that to be
where we are at times, but because I find this new Sally so completely unreliable
and foreign and exhausting and challenging and frustrating and guilt inducing
and simply not-ok-for-the-long-run and most certainly not where I want to land.
There, it’s said. This is not where I want to land. I didn’t
lose Andy to land here. We don't always choose where we land. But maybe we do get to say where we want to go after we land. I want to at least be able to balance again. I want to
be the woman who can balance work and home and do them both well instead of
conquering work and then swimming upstream outside of work. And it all comes
down to motivation, and I guess throw in a little being mentally spent at the
end of the day. I lost Andy to be a better version of Sally as I learned to
thrive in this new scenery. I know it is coming. In so many ways I am thriving…but
not yet in task motivation. In fact, I’ve under achieved. It’s complete
de-motivation. I’m sure it’s just my
brain still doing its sorting dance as the pieces continue to fall into place. Maybe I can hire said bearded man with the clip board tallying up grieving statistics to come keep me on task.
So, why am I throwing all of this out on the table for the
world to read? Well, if you have been reading my writing for any time at all, by
now you know me. We in this one-up-each-other society spend too much time sweeping life
under the rug, instead portraying our life’s perfect moments, our perfect days,
and our perfect families. Meanwhile women (and men) are drowning in everyday
life wondering what in the world is wrong with their “imperfect life”. And that
makes me utterly heartbroken for our world and what we’ve done. If you are
grieving, you need to know that these strange new pieces of your personality
you are seeing, still 4 months later, are completely normal. (And this doesn't just apply to grief, it applies in many scenarios in life that punch you in the gut. I was just speaking of this with a friend whose spouse just got a cancer diagnosis.) Grief is a superpower.
Not in that it makes you better, but in that it has super natural abilities to
impact you. There is no shame in that. There is awareness in that. We need to
lower the expectations for life to be what it used to be, at least initially.
You simply may not be able to juggle it all for a while. Is the world going to
crumble because I have an extra layer of dust on my bedside table this week?
Nope! Is the national debt going to grow because I didn’t get that extra load
of laundry done? Nope! Might I have improved mental stability because I skipped
vacuuming the loft? Quite possibly. I
can’t skip everything forever, but I can allow myself different expectations
and prioritize differently than I did before. And I can ask for some grace
period with family and have open discussions about “this is what you can expect
from me, this is what I can and can’t do successfully right now” and “this is
how you can help me” moving forward. I’m also telling you this because I spent
an entire month wondering what in the world was going on with me. I can only imagine the upcoming anesthesia is
going to worsen this for me. You know how me and anesthesia don’t mix so well.
So there’s that.
Eighteen to 24 months of disrupted sleeping and eating
patterns. I’d say motivation is totally reasonable to add to that list, well
and maybe a few other things as well Mr. Bearded Man with a clipboard. Maybe things get under my skin a little
easier too. Here’s the silver lining. I’m
overly motivated in other ways. Like cherishing things in life. God’s gifts in chaos.
To access previous blog posts - click HERE.
To access previous blog posts - click HERE.
