In my own experience so far grief is every cliche that has ever been described, up and down, a roller coaster, heart breaking etc, etc.
It is in reality all of those things and more. I have felt real physical heartbreak before but this, this is different. I actually feel some part of me has been wrenched from my body, physically and emotionally. I just feel this utter and complete loss, the loss of the man I love and the loss of every emotion and feeling he ever made me feel. The loss of my purpose in life, my daily routine, everything that made us a couple.
I have lost the man I had been married to for nearly 21 years, my friend, my love, my soul mate and nothing I have ever experience in my life compares to this.
This grief it feels like riding out the most violent wave in tumultuous oceans, but with the calms of the doldrums taking hold for days at a time. When these calms set in you are living in a numb daze. You exist, you live, you do everyday stuff, you smile when others smile, you talk when others talk, but you are detached from your own existence, so numb and so terribly lost.
Occasionally a wave will lift you up, the sun will shine and momentarily you can see positivity, strength, reasons to exist, your children, your family, your friends, all there for you, sometimes you can even feel anger, but with the next breath you are dragged down into the depths, gasping for air, dragged into the most unimaginable pain of grief. Everything seems pointless, logic is lost, everything is lost and all you want is to be with your love. You look into the future without them and see nothing but darkness and emptiness. What is the point to anything, to all you have without them.
How can this ever get better? Yet when you have cried yourself into a tearless drought you are suddenly lifted up again into the doldrums, where you can catch your breath and feel releaved on one hand that you have survived that plunge into the depths of grief, but then know it will not be the last. You try and do something positive, something to anchor you to the here and now, something that will make you feel normal again, but for now it is just a life buoy, you are still adrift, still lost in grief, but for the moment you aren't drowning..... And so the cycle continues.
I don't think this will ever change, no matter how much time passes, just the times you get dragged under will become less frequent and the times the sun will shine will become more so. When that will happen though, is anybody's guess.
The thing is I know all of this is normal, the other side of grief for me is love. If you love you will grieve at it's loss, it is inevitable.
Knowing all of that doesn't stop the missing though, the wanting him back, the need to hold him again, smell him again, see his smile again, sleep with him again, hold his hand again, laugh with him again, cry with him again, share my life with him again. How will I ever learn to live without him? even if the grief subsides, he still won't be here. There will still be this emptiness, this complete and utter void.
I know we have to learn to live this loss, but at this moment in time I can't quite see how.
Then there is the spectre of MND that forever hangs in the air, like an unwanted fog that won't clear. I do not have the strength to fight it at the moment. I want to go into battle at full strength, so let's just say for now that MND and I........well we have unfinished business.
