#beerbottles

I'm at the cemetary picking up the weatherbeaten Christmas wreath I placed on my husband's marker weeks ago and I spy four empty Heinekein bottles lying in a puddle of water on a nearby marker.

My, my...What do we have here?

I'd like to think it was someone's birthday and four friends or relatives came to celebrate, sing and raise one for their family member or friend.

Or maybe one person came and had a good time drinking four beers while talking and singing to their loved one.

Either way the empty beer bottles don't bother me at all.  At another location, people would regard the Heinekein bottles as trash and would be annoyed to find them laying the grass as litter.  Not me.  Other than creating work for the people who work at the cemetary, I like that people have been here, drinking beer, visiting someone they miss a lot and continuing with their rituals.

It is possible that a person or people were here drinking beer because they missed this person so much that they wanted to numb their sorrow.  I totally get why you would want to do that.  It is soooo tempting yet so short sighted.  I remember the day of my husband's funeral.  All I really wanted to do was drink martinis all day until I couldn't feel anything.  But numbing yourself won't get you anywhere.  It doesn't help you heal or work to get you in a good place in the long run.  When you come out of your haze, nothing's changed.  The person is still gone and the pain is still there, waiting for you to work it out.

Whether we like it or not, loss is a part of life and grief is a totally natural response to loss.  When people loose someone they love very much, they don't know what to do when their special days come along.  Some decide they will be closest to the person at the cemetary so they go to the cemetary to be close with the person, to hang out and mark a day that was special to them when they were alive.

There is no truth to the saying, "Out of sight. Out of mind."  The physical absence of someone doesn't mean  you stop thinking about that person when they die or that your need to feel close to them at particular times of the year also stops when they die.  I know someone who still bakes a cake on her father's birthday even though he died years ago and we still hang my husband's Christmas stocking on the  fireplace right beside the others.

We all have our rituals to ease the pain and they are precious.

Humor Therapy

Do you know there is actually a medical term or name for using humor to help yourself feel better?

According to WebMD, humor therapy or therapeutic humor, purposely uses the power of smiles and laughter to promote healing and distract the person from pain, or in this case, the emotional confusion permeating your life while grieving.

New grief is all about learning to live with a sense of unreality.  Unfortunately, until you actually experience this raw emotion, you can't really imagine how it feels.  You think you know, you think you can conjure up those feelings of deep pain but it doesn't work that way.  I think that's why people who have been lucky enough not to experience a death in their families think you can "get over" the loss of a loved one in six months or a year.  To put it simply, grieving is not the opposite of happiness. 

For years, you wake up next to a person, talk to them every day, eat with them, love them and share everything with them.  Then, suddenly, instantly, they aren't with you anymore.  But you are expected to carry on.  And somehow you manage to figure out a way to do this.  It may not be what everyone else thinks you should do but it works for you and that's what's important.  There are no magic formulas.  You find yourself saying things such as: "I can't believe he (or she) is gone." "This is so unreal."  "Where is he (or she)?"  "I would just feel a little better if I knew exactly where he (or she) is; that they are somewhere where I know they are okay.  Do you think they're okay?"

Even now, eight years later, I wonder where my husband actually is.  Okay, maybe I made you laugh by saying that, but it's true. 

I try to imagine that he is doing something he really liked A LOT because that always makes me smile.  Depending on the time of year, sometimes I think he's at  a Yankees game, eating a hotdog and wearing his favorite hat or he's at a Giants football game, eating a hotdog, wearing his other favorite hat and screaming his head off.  Then again, maybe he's at the beach lounging in a chair, reading or swimming.  Sometimes, I imagine he is with his friends who have also died and they are all sitting around in some heavenly bar drinking and telling each other non-stop stories.  I don't know. . . Maybe he's doing all of those things.  Or maybe's he a child again.  After awhile, I have to put the brakes on myself because I start to get overwhelmed by the very idea of it.

But I think I'm pretty sure about one thing:  he's probably not at the cemetary.  While there is a marker there for him, it's more of a touchstone for us, the people who cared about him and loved him.  Sometimes we go there and do silly things that we think he would like.  We've scattered his favorite cookies all over his grave, released balloons and arranged flowers that were his favorite color.  Once, we were going to put hash marks in the grass like a football field but we figured we would get into trouble for that so we put the kibash on that idea, at least temporarily.

Continuing in the same vein of therapeutic humor, one of the more irreverant things my family ever did was in the cemetary after my husband was just buried.  It was early December and he still didn't have a marker on his grave yet.  It had snowed and we kept guessing where he was and we fogot to look for the metal ring in the ground so we all kept guessing different places which got to be ridiculous.  We were in the right neighborhood but not in the exact spot.  Finally one day some people in my family had had it with the guessing game and the lack of a marker.  I think it was one of those "perfect storm" moments when strong emotions came together and they decided to act.

They saw all these small Christmas trees on a large headstone and spontaneously decided to take one and put it in the place where they thought my husband was buried.  I can't even remember if it was the right place or not.  Anyway, then they put lots of other Christmas decorations around the tree they had erected in the snow to mark off his grave so they would definitely know where he was and where to go the next time.

As always, I know they acted out of love plus you have to remember that they were trying to deal with their own feelings of loss.  It was our first Christmas without him and it was important to them that they knew exactly where he was and so they fixed it.  Grief is definitely an uncharted journey that takes you AND others to some funny places.