Last night I had a dream about my late husband, Tom. 

I dreamed about him like it was present-day and we were making the decision to pursue a bone marrow transplant or a transition to hospice. I dreamed that if we had chosen the bone marrow transplant he would be living. I dreamed we made the wrong choice, I made the wrong choice. 

The dream was so real it caused me to grapple with the balance between caring for my cancer-ridden husband and showing up fully in my current life where I’ve found love again. In the dream, I ran back and forth between the present and the past like the two worlds co-existed.

The truth is, they kind of do co-exist, at least for me, and I think that’s my best description of grief. 

It’s been 7 years since Tom’s passing and when I sit down to write my grief story my brain inevitably starts with Tom’s cancer diagnosis. I could outline this story in my sleep based on the amount of times I’ve verbalized it. An initial misdiagnosis followed by an aggressive cancer diagnosis. Chemotherapy, relapse, more chemotherapy, an almost clinical trial (I’ll save that one for another day), a second opinion, and eventually a decision to pursue hospice all within the span of 9 months. 

But as I sit here writing every detail from Tom’s diagnosis to his untimely passing at the age of 31 I’m challenged to say, wait - this is Tom’s cancer story and maybe at one point was my grief story…but is this my grief story now? 

It’s weird to write about your grief story when you are still living your grief story. From word vomiting this story to anyone I would interact with because I didn’t know where to put it, to holding it in like our culture suggests and pretending like it wasn’t something I thought about every single day, to this - a thoughtfully curated encounter of what it was, still is, and always will be. A story of grief, my story, in the way I remember it.

My grief story starts at the age of 26 with anticipatory grief, when somehow from the very beginning I knew this diagnosis was bad. When reflecting on the 9-month span, one of my friends would point out that I knew the entire time, I could feel it in my gut. Tom was preparing to die and I was preparing to figure out how to live without him. And that’s where the separation began. I became a caregiver, fully shifting into the compartmentalization I relied so heavily on as a healthcare provider exposed to death and hard things all too frequently. 

I checked out emotionally and to everyone else seemed to be ‘so strong’ and to ‘have it all together,’ when every night I would cry in the shower and kick adult diapers around the halls of my house in protest. My worst fear imaginable was happening and somehow I had to figure out how to keep moving forward. 

The worst day of my life was Monday, August 7th, 2017. While my head had been mentally preparing for Tom to die, it wasn’t until a few weeks before that my heart finally caught up. Here he was dying, a reality we both expected, and somehow I wasn’t at all ready to let him go. The moment he died I ran out of the doors of my house screaming at the top of my lungs so much so that neighbors stopped me on the street to check on me. I remember trying to find my breath through the tears and wondering why this was so hard for me when I had known it was coming all along. This was what my grief looked like in its most raw form. 

From that point on, my grief has looked like a lot of things. 

A cross-country solo move to finish my pursuit of becoming a cancer pharmacist because that was all I knew to focus on and what I felt like he would want for me. 

At least 4-months of sitting in my apartment with unpacked boxes and trying to make friends despite finding it so hard to relate to anyone because who could relate to a 27 year old that just lost her husband. 

Diving into memoirs or any book I could find that validated how I was feeling while finally working up the courage to see a therapist, then jumping through a few therapists before trying one more time to find someone that actually got it (she did and I still meet with her). 

Distancing myself from my old life (family, friends, location) to try to figure out what life looked like for me now, who I was without my husband, and who I wanted to be. 

Traveling, hiking, adventure, trying new foods, experiencing new places (it doesn’t always have to look bad).

Finding my dream job working in a cancer clinic and teaching future pharmacy students only to realize I was pouring everything into my work under the disguise of fulfillment when it was really being used as my excuse to disassociate at the end of the day and I needed to press pause to do some internal work before I could work in this setting again. 

Always wondering if what I was experiencing was normal for a single young-adult professional or if this was grief.

There are so many more examples of grief I could put here and I promise I will continue to share these with you. Not for you to pity me or feel sorry for me but to hopefully make you feel less alone in your grief. To share with you what grief can look like, so when you find yourself questioning -  is this normal? -  you have somewhere you can go to feel like it is. What really is normal anyways? 

More to come - I am so glad you’re here.

XOXO

Laura