www.HoneyIShrunkTheGrief.com
© 2012 Eric Vaiksnoras

“It will teach you to love what you’re afraid of, after it takes away all that you’ve learned to love.”
~Jack Johnson lyrics from Hope
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The initial months following Julie’s death felt like a whirlwind of just about every emotion I can think of. I was often left feeling exhausted, confused, numb, and scared. I desperately searched and prayed for the healing light of hope, and clung to any form of it I could find. To compound the situation, two other dearly loved family members died shortly after Julie; my mother-in-law passed away 11 months later, followed by my dad, on my 32nd birthday. Death was unmistakably in my face and the resulting pain was excruciatingly deep.

My Loving Mother-in-Law
So excited to be a grandma!
October 2003

Cooking with My Dad
“The Lasagna!”
December 1995
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Looking back on these early widowed days, I find myself asking, “Why does this hurt so much?”. It seems like a simple enough question; yet, I have to admit, it really intimidates me. I think I’m intimidated by it because I know underneath its somewhat innocent appearance lays a challenging and multi-layered answer, and in order to have access to a closer look at these layers, I have to further immerse myself in memories of those early painful days. Ironically, it’s this same awareness of difficulty and fear that attracts me to this question. I typically enjoy exploring my fears—not for the pain that can accompany such an undertaking—but for the rewards that lie on the other side. I’ve found at the heart of these rewards lies an invaluable commodity—greater peace. It is with these thoughts in mind that I set out to examine: “Why does this hurt so much?”.

I would like to begin this search by sharing three very private letters that I wrote to Julie after she died. I am willing to share such personal notes because I think they help capture some feelings I’d have difficulty expressing in any other way. I have copied the letters onto this page, word for word, to be sure they were kept in their purest form. They were written approximately 2 months, 3 months, and 9 months after Julie’s death, and they are listed in that order.

The first one is a message I sent in June of 2004 to the email account Julie had last used:
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Subject: i miss you

julie,
hi sweetheart. it’s been just over 2 months and i don’t know what to do or think. i miss you so much. i can’t believe all of this. i have total faith in God and that is what is keeping me together. i am in such shock. i still feel so close to you and to God but am very confused. how did this happen? i want to fight for you and bring you back. i never got to fight. i do know that you are safe. thank you for helping me to feel your presence often. thank you for being the most caring and loving wife to me. i know that we will be together again someday and that comforts me. what is it like up there? can you see me? i can’t wait to see you when it’s my time. you are going to get the biggest hug ever! save me a permanent spot on your cloud or your star or wherever the magnificent place is that you are! i love you soooooooooooo much. i am so lucky to have had you in my life. thank you for making me feel so special and so very loved. we have so many amazing memories in our years together. i am so grateful for those. so many emotions. it hurts so bad even though I know that you are safe. can you believe how many lives you touched? holy cow, you must be in shock. how were you that wonderful to me and all those other people at the same time? you are amazing! i think about you all the time. david is getting so big. i don’t know exactly what you can see and that is hard for me. i wish you were right here with me enjoying every second of the life that we created. help me to take care of him. i love him so much. when will I get to see you? i know, i’m not supposed to know the answer to that one. well, whenever it is, i can tell you that we will start over exactly where we left off. maybe we don’t even have to start over. can we still grow together until that day comes? i think and hope that we can. i still can feel you and somehow know to some degree how you feel. that is pretty awesome. please help me to keep my head up and to continue to feel your presence. if you can see my grandmas, mickey, and other family, please give them a hug for me! i love you always julie. i don’t know what else to say but you will always be inside me and a most wonderful part of me. you have brought so much joy to my life.
your hubby,
eric v
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This next one is a handwritten letter I wrote a few weeks later
(roughly 3 months after she died)…
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Julie,
Hi Sweetheart! I’m sitting upstairs in the Starbucks at Kent. I was just thinking how badly I wanted you here with me. I’m at a little round table with two chairs. It’s kinda dark up here. There’s a little old fashioned lamp casting just the right amount of light on the table. I miss you so much. If you were anyplace but in heaven I would wish you back here with me. I wonder when we’ll get to be together again. It’s very hard not knowing. We were so lucky to have each other. I want more. I can’t wait to see you again. I pray that God keeps us together even when we are apart. Remember when we were first dating and we would go to coffee shops? You later accused me of being a fake coffee drinker! I had so much fun with you. It was so easy. We just belonged together. Julie, please be there to greet me when it’s my time. I want to spend eternity with you. 
Eric
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And this one was written 9 months after Julie’s death:
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Lost and Found
I have lost my beloved everything
But I am finding more and more of her each day
Our love is capable of stretching infinite distances
I am determined to fully learn how this can be done
Our love is becoming stronger than it ever has been
I will find her I am sure of this
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With the help of these letters taking me back, and with some additional time to reflect on it all, more of the numerous sources of hurt start to reveal themselves to me. These early months were a time of such mixed emotions. In many ways I felt hope, even from day one, but I still felt broken and lost inside. There was such uncertainty in everything. I struggled with my new identity. Who am I? Am I the same person I was before all of this? What do I do with all these feelings that I still have for Julie?

“Till death do you part” snuck up and parted us, but I still had this huge mass of love, hope, and dreams that I didn’t know what to do with. Life had instantly become so new—so different from what we had planned and expected. Ours was supposed to be one in which we grew old together, supported each other through the good and bad times, and got to raise a family in as loving a way as we knew how. This was not what we expected at all; this was completely different—and “different” hurt deeply.

So much of my world had a connection to Julie that I was left dumbfounded. She was physically gone, a most incredibly drastic change. One that marked a devastating and very presumable end to our relationship—yet so much of her was still a part of me, still surrounded me, still fueled me—that it was just as easy to see it couldn’t be the end.  What an incredibly confusing time. Her physical presence in my life was all that I had ever known. I didn’t yet know that I still had the ability to quench my deepest need—my need to be able to connect with her love whenever I needed to. How could I have known? This was all so new.

I also struggled greatly with feelings of guilt. I found this close partner of death to be quite ruthless, feeding off of anything I felt insecure about or had not yet come to peace with—which at this point, was plenty. One example of a good beating I took from guilt came from my actions during the first crucial minutes that passed after Julie’s cardiac arrest.

I was at home in our living room when it happened. I heard a loud noise in the adjacent bedroom. I called out to make sure everything was all right but didn’t get any response. The eerie silence caused me to get up and check on things, and I found her unconscious on the floor next to our bed. There was no question that she needed immediate help; I ran to the phone and called 911. There was a fire station a quarter mile down the road from us, and the paramedics arrived within minutes.

I replayed these frantic moments over and over again in my mind. I believe I did so because I couldn’t accept that my perfectly healthy looking 27 year old wife could be fine one minute and completely lifeless the next. This defied everything within reason, and I desperately searched for an explanation. This need for an explanation soon got twisted into a need to blame someone or something for all of this—and at that time, I seemed as good of a candidate as any to blame.

I interrogated myself with non-stop “instant replays” of those initial 3 to 4 critical minutes before paramedics arrived. I frantically searched to find answers to countless “what if?” questions. What if I had put the phone down after giving the 911 dispatcher our address, so I could have put all my energy into performing CPR rather than answering her long list of additional questions? What if I did this…? What if I did that…?  I grilled myself over and over again with every conceivable question I could think of that could have altered this unacceptable outcome. These types of irrational, destructive, and unanswerable questions consumed me. The ridiculousness of this is all too obvious now. Of course I did everything to the very best of my ability to try and save my wife. What more can I expect of myself? Her death wasn’t the result of anybody’s fault, it was life’s fault. But at the time, this wasn’t so clear to me. Guilt brought me an incredible amount of hurt, and I found it very difficult to forgive myself, even for things that were completely out of my control.

There were other sources of my pain as well. It was extremely difficult to feel like I didn’t have control of anything. First and foremost, there was nothing I could do to bring Julie back. That realization was torturous—unlike any pain I’ve ever felt. This brought on a fight in me to try and change things, but she had died; there wasn’t a thing I could do to bring her back. I was left with no other course of action but to find a way to live with that fact, and this was by no means the kind of control I was desperately searching for.

I also struggled with having to ask for help. I was uncomfortable needing so much help. I think this was largely because I felt like I was regressing as an adult. In my mind an adult shouldn’t need as much help as I needed. I felt bad about not being able to be a full time student, full time single dad, full time financial provider, and full time griever. I had become this needy guy who sold his house and moved in with his mom and her partner. How did this happen? There just wasn’t enough of me to manage everything by myself, and it really hurt having to ask everyone for so much help.

I remember feeling so uncertain of my future. I simply felt lost. Often times “coasting” felt like the best thing to do. I needed this valuable semi-static time to grieve and assess my new situation. Julie had become such a part of me that in many ways I felt gone as well. During this time I remember sympathizing with seniors, having thoughts about those who had lost a spouse after a lifetime of marriage. I could now understand why older widows and widowers often die shortly after their spouses do. I also understood that I was too young to let this happen to me. I was only 30 years old and had too much to live for, including a bright eyed 5 month old son who needed me. I knew I had to make it no matter what, yet it hurt tremendously not knowing how.

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I’ve just listed some of the bigger causes of my hurt, now I’d like to take a look at the exact opposite: What has helped to alleviate my hurt? Hopefully looking at it from another angle will help to provide a more complete picture.

To assist me in my healing in the beginning, I sought the help of a counselor.  I felt strong enough to do this about 6 months after Julie died. I was hesitant to go at first. I think part of this hesitation was due to my aversion to asking for help, especially at that time in my life, when I was already feeling self-conscious about receiving so much help from others. I was also afraid of the unknown, and had fears of what a professional would have to say of my condition. Would I be diagnosed as “too screwed up”? The thought of such an assessment, and resulting further loss of hope, was a big counseling turn off for me. In my mind, putting myself in a position to be analyzed meant that I would be in even more of a vulnerable state than I was currently in, and that was a very scary feeling. I simply didn’t understand the counseling process at that time.

I was hurting badly enough, though, that I think the pain eventually overshadowed my hesitations, and I was able to convince myself to see a counselor. I’m so glad I did because I grew a great deal from the experience. My counseling concerns soon vanished as I began to see the positive effect that counseling was having on me. I attended all of my weekly sessions and, with the help of a great counselor, started to become more and more dedicated to things that promoted my healing. This further helped me to gain control of my life. My confidence grew as I started to see that I was very capable of meeting my grieving needs. I started to recognize that I could turn to my creative side to bail me out of just about any painful moment that I was stuck in. I began to turn more of my focus to what I had control over and would search out creative ways to meet whatever need was causing me pain (this important and healing reaction will be illustrated numerous times throughout the remainder of this book).

I began to put a lot of energy into searching for pieces of hope in my new world. I imagine this was because I felt so hope-deficient inside that I needed massive quantities of it to meet the demands of my healing heart. Fortunately, I found plenty of it around. I began to see that I could locate a piece of hope in just about anything, and when I did, I would try and find a way to grow from it.

One of the ways I grew from hope was by searching for it in various literary forms—books, quotes, song lyrics—you name it.  I would then use these collected pieces of hope as building blocks to help me develop my own perspective tools. These were handpicked/homemade constructive tools that I could apply to my life whenever I needed help. An example of one of my favorites is the statement, “I am my reaction, not my misfortune”. These words help to remind me that although I will experience many perceived misfortunes in my life, ultimately, it’s how I react to what happens that defines me. I don’t have to be the helpless victim who’s at the mercy of fate or chance. I’m in the driver’s seat and can choose what I want my reality to consist of.

I strongly believe that one of the main reasons tools of this kind have been so influential in my healing is because I had a hand in their construction. I didn’t have a voice in death taking Julie, and there’s nothing I can do about that, but there is something I can do about how I choose to heal―and it feels really good to have a part in this process.

My willingness to consider that I can actually grow from this hurt is another thing that brings me great hope. I’ve come to realize that I will never be wise enough to properly label my life events; I’ve had too many rewarding and transformational things come out of circumstances that I had initially labeled as “misfortunes”. This helps me be much more open to the idea that my misfortunes are very likely to be packed with gold.

I’ve found one such piece of gold while taking a closer look at the types of connections that I share with others. I see the physical connections I have with those around me as the kind I find great comfort and familiarity in, but I’m finding that it’s the soulful ones that are at the core of my existence; the soulful ones that give my life meaning and purpose. This awareness has me wondering if this is all some sort of transitional step that is helping prepare me for whatever afterlife awaits? Maybe the pain, and resulting growth, is giving me a valuable glimpse of how I will someday eternally exist and soulfully connect with my loved ones? That sure is a heart-warming thought.

I cannot be certain of what lies beyond this life, but one thing I do feel certain about is that all of this pain has not been for nothing. My hurt has made me a better me, and has allowed me to connect with this world in new and beautiful ways.

Why does this hurt so much?  I still find this to be an incredibly difficult question to answer. I have a hard time making sense of it because I feel the hurt coming from so many places. Feeling lost hurts, change hurts, fear hurts, having to be patient hurts, being selfish hurts, losing hope hurts, growth hurts,…and the list could go on. If I had to sum it up in just a few lines, in an attempt to provide a more encompassing response, it would look something like this…

Because I’m left with both a Void (Julie’s physical absence) and Everything (our Love). And I want the Everything—without the Void—but I can never have that again.

and that Hurts.

 

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