Talking About Grief with DH

The good thing about summer and not having to work is that one can take care of things that come up at inopportune times, like late at night, and not worry about the need to wake up in the morning for work. It's okay to have a breakdown at midnight because I can sleep in (which means I don' have to wake up at 4:45 a.m.). And if the kids wake me up early at 6:30, and I'm still tired, I can take a nap. That's what happened yesterday.

Let me also say that I've been trying to decrease my Diet Coke consumption lately. Of course, when I was pregnant with Michael, if I drank any Diet Coke, it was caffeine free. And since I tend to be an anxious person, prone to panic attacks, well, caffeine isn't a good choice of a substance to put in my beverages. Especially lately, as I've been dealing with grief and my new life. But I still love Diet Coke, and I powered down 24 ounces of the stuff last night at my mom's when I took the kids over for dinner. I don't know what I was thinking. I should have known better.

DH asked me later that night, "You're up past your bedtime aren't you?" That's what two cans of Diet Coke at 5:30 p.m. does to me now, I guess. Mind you, my bedtime is normally like 8:05 p.m., which is about five minutes after we put the kids to bed. AND I hadn't taken a nap earlier. So the fact that I was still up and raring to go struck DH as highly unusual.

So I finally climbed into bed at around 11:15. I still wasn't tired. I needed to talk. I got teary right away. I was headed for a crying jag, but I had no worries because there was no work to wake up for.

Let me just say that DH pissed me off earlier in the week. It was over laundry and it was stupid, but I was still harboring anger. So I started off with this, but it led into the fact that I've been disturbed by the fact that in the past two weeks we hadn't been "connecting" as we had during and right after our whole baby loss debacle. We used to sit on the couch each evening after the kids were put to bed and cry or just talk about things, and we hadn't done that in a month, and I missed that. (For two weeks DH was gone for business, and the past two weeks . . . like two ships moving in the night.) So that broke the ice and we lay in bed talking a bit, "connecting" as I had wanted to, needed to. This led to me crying and telling DH about a dream that my Aunt shared about earlier at dinner, that she had felt my grandma's presence in the dream, and that because of the dream, she was certain that grandma and Aunt H (my grandma's sister) had reunited, because Aunt H had just passed this week. It was like a message that Grandma and Aunt H were okay. I was jealous; I wanted -- I've been praying for -- that dream that gives me the certain feeling that Michael is okay. I've even thought about going to see a psychic medium because I so desperately want a connection with Michael. I told DH that I missed Michael; I confessed I thought about him daily--many, many times each day. I probably think about Michael and how much I miss him as much as most men think about women and sex each day. It consumes my thoughts. I don't cry, necessarily, but he pops into my mind often. I said that I hoped he was in heaven with my grandma. That he was there with DH's Uncle J, who just passed, too. DH said he thought about Michael, too, but that it is a little bit easier to talk about him when the subject comes up, as it did when he was away on business for those two weeks. I felt better hearing from DH that he is still feeling the pain, too . . . that I am not alone in this walk I'm making down my new life path. And I agreed that it is getting easier . . . slowly, but it is. So it was a bummer conversation, and we both got depressed a bit, but we ended up laughing, too, and we were able to drift off to sleep. And I felt better because the connection was made again.