I cannot believe many things today.
I cannot believe I have not written in two years.
I cannot believe Hayley has been gone 7 years. She should be 26.
I cannot believe it is July 11th.
I cannot believe I feel the same level of suffering for these dates as I did last year.
I cannot believe I am not better.
I just cannot believe.
In July 2022 I had picked up the blog again right after the trial ended. I was finally free to write again. I could tell her story. All of it. I don’t remember why I stopped. But there is a “Part 4” in the draft section that I will complete. Just not tonight. If you asked me how long it has been since I wrote, I would have guessed maybe a year. Certainly not two years. I didn’t know until I opened this page. Everything is different than 2 years ago. Different but exactly the same. I see in my last July 2022 post the Night Terrors were a thing. Guess what? Medication helped with that. I stopped taking the Prazosin. Yet in the last month, the night terrors are back. Is June always going to trigger them? Will it be like this forever?
Last week I woke up to my husband saying “STOP SCREAMING”. I woke up still one foot in the dream and one foot out. I expected that he would give me a hug, a pat on the back, maybe ask if I was ok. Nope. He rolled over and went back to sleep. He did nothing wrong. I had the wrong expectations. The two dogs didn’t even wake up. Had hearing me scream in my sleep become such a part of my sleep routine that nobody was phased. Not even the dogs? My Mom was in the guest room visiting. I wondered if she had heard me. She didn’t, she refuses to admit her hearing may be going. But I am glad she didn’t hear me, she has not slept well for so long. Last year her husband died.
Sleep has been an issue for me since April 1998 when Hayley Storm was born and ruined sleep for me forever. Most babies do. But she was extra good at it. She was an amazing breast feeder. I knew I was lucky, not everyone has a good or easy experience. I swear my left breast could feed an entire town of babies. When my husband stayed home with her for 12 weeks, she refused to take a bottle. Like refused. She did not eat when I was at work. He tried every nipple, every bottle, wore my clothes, tried to hold her different ways. If it was not me it was not happening. She would then cluster feed all night long. We were exhausted. I think it was the last 3 weeks of his leave that she finally gave in. But I was still her pacifier all night long. Everyone said to let her get hungry enough and she will do the bottle. We refused. She had us trained immediately to continue to do everything to make her happy for the rest of her life. My son, he weaned his chubby self at six months. Hayley was 4 and an excellent sleeper and he just wanted to sleep near us. But sleep just got harder for me when I had two gorgeous and amazing little humans to worry about and to take care of.
The nightmares are always different. I never have the same one twice. But it is always the same feeling of not being able to find someone or something. I can’t stop something from happening. The dreams are always complicated. They are always about lack of control and always terrifying. When I say I wake up screaming. It is not a scream, it is always yelling a word or a phrase. One morning last week I had moved to the couch, hoping a change of scenery would make a difference. It didn’t; I just had round two and woke up yelling “Help Me” in the late morning. I felt guilty like I had yelled “fire” in a crowded place. Our main floor at our home on the Coast is a Beach Town and the crushed shell sidewalk is right on the other side of the porch which is right on the other side of the window where the couch sits. I honestly didn’t care if someone had heard me, but I was thankful to not have to explain that on the porch. This time the dogs did notice but probably because I had missed their breakfast time.
I don’t know where to start. Except to start sharing. Between now and August 2022 I have split my time between our original home and a home at the Coast. Close enough to hear the Ocean. If home is where we raised the kids then the Coast is where I feel closer to Hayley. My Ocean Loving Girl. It has been a difficult two years. It just felt like it was always something. After the trial, I assaulted a man in an airport. We built our beach house. We remodeled our home not to erase memories but to refresh the space. It was brutal having to remove everything from the house. Most of it is still in bins in a storage unit. I was in no condition to make decisions on Hayley’s belongings. I have stopped finding her mismatched KBell socks. That makes me sad.
I lashed out at the world, fought battles that did not need to be fought, was taken advantage of (people are greedy) and made new friends to replace the ones that ended their journey with me when Hayley died. It is just how I am built. I was diagnosed with an auto immune disease. That is not uncommon after a traumatic event. I developed a new heart arrhythmia. I unknowingly went through menopause and a hyper thyroid.
I am more aware of other’s pain around me. Hayley’s death has hurt so many. The anger is so real. I imagine what I would do if the people that caused her death were in the same room as me. The consequences of their actions has made ripples that have impacted so many others than just me. I often wonder when I will run into one of them. It is a small world. I wonder if I am ever in the same space as one of the Jurors from the trial. The trial that we regret. The trial that caused a new level of PTSD. The trial that they got so wrong. I hope that the Jurors never find out how wrong they got it. That the lawyers manipulated them. They flat out lied. They dragged us through a slow five week walk through hell. I don’t want them to know. If they did, they would just be another victim of this tragedy. Knowing would accomplish nothing.
I found a counselor this year that I love. I don’t always like what she has to say but I trust her. Grief counseling that I tried in the past was a bust. I thought it was my fault. I wasn’t ready for it. But it was because I had not found the right person. Seeking counseling this year has been the best thing for me. I don’t know what my story will look like this year, but for now it is better than last week, it is better than last month, it is better than last year. Don’t get me wrong it is Brutal with a capital B. It leaves you raw, angry and sad. Making the weekly commitment establishes a schedule that feels a bit like I have control over my life. I wish insurance made annual counseling as important as getting your blood pressure checked. It should be a thing. Without some degree of mental health, physical health is losses on us. Stress kills.
Last year we lost two of the three dogs that Hayley left behind including her baby, “Zoey”. It was traumatic and not the ideal way to have it happen. I still forget it happened and expect that they are at the house I am not at. One of her childhood dogs is still sticking by me in addition to the Golden Retriever that “tricked” us into bringing him home 7 years ago. They are a good reason to get out of bed each morning. Charlie at 14 and not being part of a larger pack now has allowed him to step up. The littles were definitely the boss of everyone. He has always been a good dog. He was just always overshadowed by the bossy littles. He has depths of empathy that were always there but now will be sorely missed when he is gone. They are a part of our family. I will be forever thankful to be able to afford to have them in my life.
I have seen the worst and the best of people in the last two years. Unfortunately the worst are the ones that stand out and stick with you longer than the best ones. I hope that by the end of 2024 I may actually be able to learn to control my need to fix people. No matter how many times my efforts go wrong, sometimes oh so wrong, I still truly believe that I can and should fix everyone else. The problem with that is I don’t fix myself. It is not because I think I don’t need to be fixed, it is because working on yourself is difficult and painful. It is easier to help others.
There is a reason they label a stage of Grief “Denial”. Denial is my friend. It does not necessarily look like I thought it would at the beginning of this path. I thought it meant you would truly deny that your child was dead. But it is not like that. It is standing still. If I don’t move, if I don’t talk, if I just deny it, the pain is tolerable. It is survival. Everyone has some kind of trauma. It is not a contest. I had found myself completely sad and angry hearing someone complain about their child. I think, well they are not dead so there is that. I have softened. I can tolerate this now, even participate in the conversation. I don’t get a trophy for this. There is no #1 MOM mug for this. It is not a contest.
Gratitude is not my thing. I think it is a trendy activity. I remember in the past that people would use social media to post something they were thankful for every singe day until Thanksgiving. My friend and I totally ridiculed those people. (in private). I feel a bit guilty about that. Why does everything have to be a contest? Can’t one thing you are grateful for be enough? I just felt some of the things were made up or they just didn’t have enough to be thankful for that they would be stretching it those last 10 days. Making something happen to be thankful for. Like how I make lists, endless ‘to do’ lists. I will add something I already did, just to be able to have the satisfaction of crossing it off. Gratitude can be like that. Sometimes you have to make something happen so you can check that box each day so you are not 100% miserable. Just 99% miserable. If it works for you, good for you. Gratitude journaling is not for me. It never has been. Because for every gratitude I can find an opposite to balance it. By nature I am snarky. Humor is survival. If I can make others and myself laugh at anything, that is a good day. Denial makes the living tolerable.
It is about how much can you tolerate. Counseling right now for me is about how much pain, self reflection, grief, or emotion I can tolerate at any given moment. Then learning to tolerate more. It will be great if counseling makes my marriage stronger. I will be grateful for that. But what I really want is the skill and ability to tolerate my own existence. I will never be a good partner until I can do that.
I am sure I talked about being Strong in past posts. I no longer respond negatively to someone telling me “you are so strong” or “I could not be that strong”. I have hated that so much. It is like saying to a grieving mother, by being “strong” you really are not grieving your child like you should or like they imagine they would. Again, grief is not a contest. But it is weaponized. I do it to myself. I can’t be happy today because that would not be honoring my lost child. If I find joy in something, I am not missing her enough. Everyone has an opinion about how you should feel, how you should grieve. But you are your own worst critic. I have for 7 years grieved hard. Guess what? I will continue to grieve hard. Not because my loss was bigger than your loss, but because it fucking hurts every second of every minute of every single day. I made being strong a bad thing. It feels like a dig when someone says it. But it is okay to be strong. I want myself and others to stop judging themselves by how “strong” they are after a tragedy. It is not helpful. Everything is a spectrum when you face loss, trauma or tragedy in your life. A sliding scale of many emotions, feelings, moods and thoughts. Sometimes I will say “I am having a bad Hayley day”. Because some days and some moments are just harder than others. You never have the same level of tolerance for the pain every single day. For me a good day is when my tolerance is higher than the day before.
I wondered how I would jump back into my writing. I didn’t know if I could or wanted to. But it is what worked for me. I feel like I have not even started the grief process. First I had to survive when it happened. I had to continue to breathe. Then I had to figure out what happened. Then I had to prove what happened. Then I had to make sure that people were held responsible. I had to make sure Hayley continued to make a difference in the world like she did when she was alive. I had to make sure I didn’t lose my house. Financially tragedies are not helpful. Strong is just breathing each day. But to go to work and make sure your family is taken care of is the next level Strong. Grieving is a full time job. I will never ever consider us “lucky”. We have the means because of Hayley’s death to relieve the financial stress. We can afford a counselor. We can afford two households so we can have our own space to grieve. We can afford to help others. We can afford to grieve. We can help others.
You know how we say “I can’t believe it is July? Where has the first half of the year gone?”. I say where did 2018 to 2022 go? There has always been something else that “has” to take priority over dealing with my grief. I feel embarrassed at how badly I am doing. When someone asks when Hayley died, or how long it has been, I truly do not want to answer. “A few years ago” sounds better than “7 years next week”. Why is that? Maybe we judge grieving people because we are terrified of it happening to us. If we believe that someone should “get over” the loss of a loved one, the loss of a child no less; then we feel like there is hope if it happens to us. We do not tolerate others pain well. We need and want them to get better, complete the steps, complete the grieving process. I swear I feel that I have failed at grieving. It does not feel like 7 years. How long does it feel? I don’t know. Maybe 2 years? I know as a fact I will never not be grieving the loss of my amazing daughter. 19 years of life will never be okay. How she died will never not be tragic. Wishing she was here with me will never stop. I believe that humans have evolved to require a beginning and an end to absolutely every single thing, feeling, thought and existence. Our brains cannot make sense of something that never ever ends. It is our survival instinct. The day is a constant existence of beginnings and ends at any given moment. I am hungry. I ate. I am not hungry anymore. Until I am again. We have to put things in to a cycle, it has to fit into a box so that we can make sense of it.
Hayley was born.
Hayley died.
I grieve.
A never ending cycle. Dates are a tangible reminder. Today was her surgery day. The dates of July 11th to July 24th, they will come every single year. It will never get easier. It will at best get more tolerable. It is not a process that I must complete. I will grieve always. It may make people uncomfortable. It may make people worry about me. It may make people think that something must be wrong with me. People may think I am not living life if I am actively grieving. But that is not true. Grieving is living. It does not end. It will never not hurt. I may never reach others expectations. It may always control my days. The only absolute is that I will always be Grieving. It just is. I will never complete this ‘Process’.It will never make sense. It will never have a silver lining. It will always control me.
Until I am gone.
