What is grief?

Hello faithful readers!

I found myself last night contemplating grief. Despite the title of this post, I obviously know what grief is, but my question last night to my husband was, "How do you deal with it? What is it you're supposed to do when you 'come to terms' with your grief over something?"

As many may know, my ex and I lost our son when he was a baby. I won't go into the details of how, but he was 8 months old and it was a tragic accident. I also happened to be pregnant with Lilli when Aidan passed away, I had only just found out the week before. A few months after Aidan died, I was at my friend Shannon's house babysitting her boys and saw an episode of the doctor show House. In the episode, a woman has a seizure and drops her baby in the bathtub. At first the baby is OK, but it eventually dies because the mother tries to smother him because she's hearing voices. They aren't able to save him because of a disease both he and his mother have.

Needless to say, of any episode I'd ever seen of the series, this one stuck in my brain. All these years later I still would find myself thinking of it at odd moments. Recently Kevin and I found all 8 seasons of House are now on Netflix and have begun watching it. I started thinking more about that episode, though I didn't know where it appeared in the series, and was dreading it. It came on last night. I became more and more distressed during the episode until Kevin decided we should skip that one.  

I guess I deal with grief differently than others, but for me, I have a really hard time with painful feelings. I tend to lock them up inside me, try to not think about them so much. It's not as if I've forgotten Aidan, I mention him frequently, especially since Rhys was born. But I try to avoid thinking about his actual death, the night that he died. I don't visit his grave, which I'm sure some will find very odd. I have only been to his gravesite a few times in the last 8 or so years. The last time was not long after Kevin arrived here, he went with me. I don't know that I could manage it on my own.

Last night after we had moved onto a different episode of House, my eyes kept straying to the photo album I have of Aidan. I keep on the top of the bookshelf, because it's too huge to fit on the shelf. My best friends Billie (Aidan's Godmother) and Becki made it for me with that whole scrapbooking thing. They had also bought Aidan's tombstone for him. It was a beautiful gesture that I'm still grateful for to this day. After a while I asked Kevin if he could get it down off the shelf for me. I sat looking through it, smiling at the pictures of my little guy. Other than that photo album, and one picture of him in my bedroom, I don't have pictures of him displayed anywhere else in my home.

I still have random flashbacks of scenes and emotions from the night that he died. They'll hit me out of nowhere, like someone just coming up and punching you in the gut. I keep wondering if it will ever get better. Maybe it won't if I don't deal with it all properly, but really, how do you deal with it? Talking about it? Sometimes that's the hardest of all. As close as I am to my husband, I rarely have discussed Aidan with him. When we were first 'dating' over the internet, he asked me if I wanted to talk about Aidan. I told him that I would rather wait till we were physically together before attempting it. Then, when I went to England to see him for the first time, we were lying in bed together and he asked me if I wanted to talk about it. I did, and cried in his arms, harder than I'd cried in a long time. That was only two years after Aidan had passed.

He would have been nine years old this June. I find myself wondering what he would have been like. He was such a docile, quiet, sweet little baby. Always had a smile, and was the best sleeper of all my kids. He also, out of all my kids, was the one that looked the most like me.

I guess I am sort of dealing with it, in my own way. I always tell people that are grieving that they have to do so in their own way and in their own time. I guess I should take that advice. It's just so strange, the things that can bring grief so strongly into the forefront of your mind, as happened to me last night with an old episode of a TV show.  

So I guess there isn't just one answer to my questions. Or any real answer at all. Like I told a friend once, when their child died suddenly at the age of five, and she asked me, "How do you do it?" (this was just a couple years after Aidan had died) and I told her, "One day at a time."

Dawn