Grief Appropriate?

This one is dedicated to my “new” friend, Shay.  We have literally been in the same rooms together over the years as school volunteers and Moms.  But we didn’t talk or become friends until Hayley’s death when she kept making me Chicken Pot Pies, which I did not share with Scott and Henry.  They didn’t appreciate them the way I did.  What is sad is that she is moving back to her homeland on the “other side”.  The East Coast.  We recently had breakfast together for the first time and it was fun.  Fun, a word I don’t use often.  I told her this story and she insisted I should share it with the masses.  So I will, but first the moral of the Shay/Dawn friendship.  Don’t forget to look up.  Look up from your phone.  Look around beyond your little group of friends.  Make a point to make one new friend at every school event, PTA meeting, etc.  Heck I have two friends probably reading this that I met on planes.  Social meeting sucks our time but it also allows us to collect people along the way in life.  I will forever be grateful to my Facebook network that has kept me going with everything from kind words to chicken pot pies on the porch.  I will miss Shay when she leaves, we seem like two peas in a pod.  So I plan to just steal all of her friends!

If you recall while in Arizona I became obsessed with the hotel bar and their amazing chili.  This was the best chili I have ever tasted.  It came in a pretty good size cast iron crock.  Like they hang over the fire on trail rides, not that I have been on a trail ride or do I plan to.  This magical chili came with homemade crackers.  It was meant to be shared.  The first night I may have let Scott have a few bites for show.  The second night I didn’t even try to hide the fact that not only was I going to eat the entire thing myself, I was still going to have the banana bread pudding in the mason jar.  So my nightly meal became chili in a crock and dessert in a mason jar.  It was truly Pinterest worthy.  But here is the problem.  Prior to our trip, my doctor added the medication Ambilify to my line up.  The hope was it would give me more energy and help the other medications work better.  I started off with a half and after two weeks worked my way up to a whole.  Right before the trip I noticed, how should I put this, I seem to be very noisy in the rump part of my body.  So I went to my goto WebMD specialist, my cousin, she did find in my list of meds that the Ambilify might have some gastrointestinal side effects.  Um, this was way more than “some”.  So during the trip I had gone back down to a half of a dose.  Unfortunately not prior to the chili love.  I truly felt like I was in one of those drug commercials.  You might be able to get out of bed but some patients might experience the following side effects:  “fecal incontinence, gas, heartburn, headaches, frequent urination, etc”.  Yes on the first one, but that is another story.

So here I am in Sedona having my own Chili eating contest.  Do you remember when you were dating your significant other?  How many dates or how many sleep overs before you tooted, poofed, passed gas, farted or whatever you want to call it, in front of your new love.  Here is the thing.  Scott and I have been married 22 years and together 27, most of those years we have slept in the same room.  During all of those years I have done everything possible not to fart in front of him.  No joke.  He is highly offended by it.  The few times it has slipped he has had what can only be described as a disgusted hissy fit.  Same with belching.  I know.  It IS ridiculous.  But I try to respect his pet peeves as they are not very many.  Now the kids, we let them rip in front of each other all the time.  Never with Scott around.  But our own private contests.  Hayley was known to do it quietly and lock the car windows if she was driving.  Henry when very little would toot and run around saying “do you smell it do you smell it, do you?”.  I would say to him “toot toot went the Henry train”.  So I can see how I may have encouraged their behavior.  I am pretty sure that I occasionally still use that phrase with him.  Kind of like a childhood nickname.  I can see him when he is 32 visiting us and feeling comfortable enough around HIS wife to let it go and I will exclaim “toot toot went the Henry train”.  Let’s just say Scott did not appreciate our “contests”.  He would come home from work, inhale and say “what has been going on here?”.  Without hesitation one of us would say the dog had gas.  We are a classy family that way.  But back to Sedona, It was so complicated to try to figure out how to let what needed to happen without offending Scott.  The bathroom was literally right next to the wall where Scott’s bed was.  If I went out into the living room, Henry from the sofa bed would rat me out.  Scott says that I truly believe that mine don’t smell, but these didn’t,  I swear!  They were just so super loud.  I finally let go and as they say let it rip during the night.  I found myself on outings speed walking through the lobby with my ass cheeks clenched until I could safely get away from other humans.  I don’t even want to think about what it would have sounded like in that quiet marble covered lobby.  So I survived the trip without Scott threatening divorce and we were at the airport at 5:30 am hoping to be on the first flight as we were going standby.  We sat away from the crowd.  The boys were in seats and I sat down on the floor to try to rearrange my luggage and bags to look like one carry on and one personal item.  About 5 feet behind me was a younger couple sitting on the floor with their backs against a wall talking.  I was on my rump, sitting criss cross applesauce when it happened.  Yes, yes it did.  It sounded like a gun shot.  I am still shocked no one hit the ground.  The couple behind me became silent.  I didn’t look up.  I was so mortified I felt light headed.  It was either from the embarrassment or the fact that the fart had been so powerful it knocked the breath out of me.  I could not look at Scott and Henry at all.  I knew if I did and they looked either horrified or were laughing or both, I would not be able to control the tears.  Now the way things were going and from experience that week, I knew that getting up off the ground would be a dangerous time period, kind of like landing and taking off for a plane.  I could not stand up.  I knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that when I stood up I would fart again or worse rapid fire.  I was still waiting for TSA agents to round the corner to find out who had the gun from 60 seconds ago.  Please leave I thought towards that couple.  My cheeks were burning and I felt a hot flash coming on from the embarrassment.  I still had not looked at Scott and Henry.  It is at this moment our names were called for stand by.  I didn’t move.  Scott finally got up and headed to the counter, perplexed I was not handling the details like normal.  He waved me over as they needed my identification.  I asked Henry to come give me a hand up.  I figured if I was going down in the mortification hall of fame, so was he.  My plan was to chastise him.  Pass the farting blame.  Maybe then the couple by some miracle would think that it was not me.  I spent the next 3 hours in a middle seat with my butt cheeks clenched and thankful both my seat mates had ear buds on.

The point of sharing my embarrassment was to make you giggle, make Shay happy and to introduce the topic of “Grief Appropriate”.  In 11 days I will be 47.  One thing that I have noticed at doctor’s appointments is they are starting to use the term “age appropriate”.  I want to throw something when I hear it.   “Oh, you can’t regulate your body temperature?  That sounds age appropriate”  “You are getting hair in places you never had it before.  That is age appropriate”  “you pee a little when you cough?  That is age appropriate.”  “Trouble sleeping?”  Yes, you know, age appropriate.  But what I have learned in the last 6 months is that there is something I am calling “Grief Appropriate”. Grief is so physical.  Honestly some days it is more physical than emotional.  It is not uncommon for me to have one of these symptoms or all of them on any given day.

• Insomnia
• Groggy during the day
• Headaches
• new gray hair
• new white hair
• skin issues
• sinus issues, pain
• dry red eyes
• chest pain
• trouble breathing
• brittle nails
• mood swings
• exhaustion
• restlessness – can’t sit still
• Coughing, dry throat from crying
• not hungry
• too hungry
• memory loss
• difficulty concentrating
• Stomach issues (I won’t list them, but you got the idea already)

I can have one or more of these “Grief appropriate” symptoms a day.  I can even cycle through all of them in a day.  At first I blamed a lot of them on my 32 pound weight gain and that may be true.  But as I have talked to other grieving moms and read articles online, I found that these are truly all physical symptoms of grief.  I believe this is why I isolate myself like many grieving men and women do.   Not only are we so fucking sad, but we truly don’t feel good.  For example, I have seriously had to think twice about going places out of fear of farting.  Maybe it is or isn’t the Ambilify; maybe it is the air I suck in when sobbing trying to find an escape.  But it is all Grief appropriate.

If you know another person coping with grief or maybe it is you, cut them some slack.  Unless they are literally not getting out of bed at all, these physical symptoms are what slows us down.  Please don’t forget that grieving is not just the worst thing imaginable, the loss of a child, it can be grieving a lost career, grieving the loss of normal when you are caring for a child with special needs or an aging parent needing all of your time to care for them after hip surgery.  You are grieving the loss of what you thought your day, week, year or life would look like.  This has physical consequences, so be kind to yourself.

I recently charged my dusty fitbit.  My initial thought was to have a goal of 10,000 steps.  I used to be able to do that.  This was the most ridiculous goal and totally setting myself up for failure.  The most steps I have had this week for a day has been 1,635 and that was today, because I went to Costco.  I was shocked.  But the more I think about it, it doesn’t take that many steps to go from bed to the couch and back again.  So I plan to be kind to myself and work up to it slowly and pray that I can make it around Disneyland on my birthday without having Sara push me in a wheelchair.  Although, that might be Grief Appropriate.