The Day before

9.17.14

      The grief was palpable. I had made an appointment with Kate for the morning before Kaitlyn's birthday. I didn't know what the actual day would bring, and I didn't want to force myself to get out of the house if I needed to just lay in bed all day. So the morning before, I headed out to Kate's office.
      On the way, I could feel the tears welling up in my eyes. I didn't actually cry on the way, but as soon as I went up the stairs and found myself on that familiar couch, I couldn't hold them back anymore.
       "I don't want it to have been a year," I told her through the tears falling down my face. "Its too long. It seems like forever, but at the same time all of the memories are back and strong and I can't make them quit replaying in my head. How do I make them stop?" I begged her for relief.
         Kate slowly shook her head, "You have to feel this one. You have to let your grief be what it needs to be right now."
         "I feel selfish. I should be happy that I'm pregnant. I should be able to celebrate the life that I am carrying right now."
          "Even when you have two living children, you'll find that there are times when one child needs more attention than the other one," Kate said. "This is the time that Kaitlyn needs more attention that this baby, and that's okay. It's not favoring one child over the other, it's just giving each one what they need in the time that they need it."
          "I'm miserable," I continued to confess.
          "This was the first year that I didn't stop functioning completely on Piper's birthday," Kate told me. "Every year up until now I have needed to just stop. To grieve well and to grieve hard and privately."
           "How long did it take you to get there?" I asked.
           "Three years," she said quietly. "It has been three years this year."\

           Almost two year ago, we had heard the testimony of a man at our church who had lost his wife and three kids in a horrific car accident. Little did we know that Mike's story of loss would help us in our own grief, and in the few weeks after losing Kaitlyn we happen to run into him at church when I was picking up a book for a Bible study I had decided to do.
           In that conversation, Mike warned us about what the anniversary would bring this year. He told us that everyone in his family and his wife's family grieved differently, and that we needed to be understanding of the different facets of grief.
           "Some people want to work the day of," he had told us in the lobby of the church. "Other people need to take a few days off and remember. For me, I wanted to work through it and it was always the build up of the day that was worse than the actual day. After it was over, I could do a big sigh of relief. Other people, they wanted to have some kind of 'official' mourning thing and I just couldn't do it. So just remember that in a year."

            "Alex is working tomorrow," I told Kate. "I don't know how I feel about it, to be honest."
            "Let him work through his own stuff. He compartmentalizes a lot of things because that is his training as a soldier. That's okay. Just give him grace and let his grief look the way it needs to," she advised.
         
              Our session came to a close. I started crying again and told Kate thank you for everything she had helped me with. Honestly, I don't know how my grief would have looked without her help.
              "It has been a joy," she said with passion. "You are doing so well, even though you don't feel like it right now."
              "I feel awful," I laughed through the tears again. "I so appreciate you sharing Piper with me, and allowing me to just sit and listen to your story that first day. It helped me more than you will ever realize."
              "It helps me," she said quietly. "It helps me with my own grief."
               It was then I realized, I was following in Kate's footsteps in my own way. All of the grief education and Hope Boxes that I had done over the last year, it was my grief and my honoring Kaitlyn. Kate's calling to honor Piper was to help others by sharing her story as well as listening to theirs.

               I left Kate's office feeling better, but also feeling heavy. I dreaded the next day. I ran a few errands and then went to the house to enjoy the quite for a little while.
               That night, I cried myself to sleep knowing what the next day would bring.