Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Surviving someone else's funeral

Two months after DJ passed away a friend of mine died from cancer. She was a woman in her late 40's and she left behind teenage children and a loving husband. My husband and I went to the funeral and got stuck. The church was full of people and the only seats we could get were in the middle row in the middle of the church. We were stuck. We couldn't leave, we couldn't get out of the row. Everything came back, all the emotions of DJ's death came back and flooded both of us. We were in our own little piece of hell.
How did we survive? We breathed in and out. We looked around, we quit listening to all the music and kind words. We ignored the event going on around us. I ignored the things around me but played my own movie in my head. My movie was seeing DJ at his funeral, replaying over and over his death, all the could of's and would of's. So while I was sitting there I was somewhere else. It didn't make the funeral any less painful, the funeral was horribly painful but it helped me get through it.
Now almost four years later my husband and I have another funeral to go to, a lovely woman who is leaving behind grown children and a husband of 40 plus years. You would think we would have this down by now, managing our grief. Well, no not really atleast not today. The death of this woman has hit my husband hard, it brings back all his grief all over again. I didn't know her but he did and he is grieving her and DJ at the same time. It gets intertwined, grief of her and grief of DJ. How is he surviving this? He left work for the day and he and I played golf. He got his head to think of something else for awhile, he got away from the pain. He removed himself from it so it could lessen. After two hours of golf the pain wasn't as strong, it didn't have the heaviness as before. He survived by taking his thoughts somewhere else and working physically hard.

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