In the Eternal Wake

Six months into grief, I was learning that losing your person is not one loss. There is the obvious loss. The person you love is gone. Then there are the secondary losses. The routines. The plans. The person you text when something funny happens. The person whose car you recognize pulling into the driveway. The future you assumed was waiting for you. And then, if you are a common-law spouse in Ontario, there can be another loss waiting for you—one you may have absolutely no i

This part might come sooner for you if you have children of any age, for me I didn't so it was not something I thought about until there was a little clearing of the fog. Five months after James died, I found myself thinking about something I hadn't had to face myself: what would this have looked like if there had been a child in the house? Since even in my work I don't work with children this sent me on a search and find mission and down a rabbit hole a little bit. It line

By month four, I knew I was grieving. I didn't always understand what grief was doing to me, but at least I knew what it was. There were words for what I was experiencing. Shock. Trauma. Brain fog. Anxiety. Anger. Loneliness. There were articles telling me that forgetting why I had walked into a room was normal. There were people telling me there was no timeline for grief. There were books explaining why I could be relatively okay one minute and completely fall apart the next