A Warrior's Second Chance at Grief : Mourning the Loss of Your Childrens' Parent

I believe we all have one meta level fear that is imprinted on us as a child and subsequently drives the choices we make for the rest of our lives.  All of us come into this world with a pattern that gets imprinted on us by our care givers. And then one day we finally accumulate enough pain and we are driven to heal it.  

My fear has always been of being left alone, emphasis on “left.” My worst memories growing up were when my mom and I had a fight and I was sent to my room or otherwise isolated. I hated  knowing that giving voice to disagreement meant I would be ostracized.

This pattern set me up for a very conflicted relationship with my voice. I was overly invested in “proving my worth” to the outside world, but very uncomfortable doing so in intimate relationships.

It’s the reason I stayed in an unhealthy marriage for far too long and spent  much of my sons’ early and middle childhoods on a merry go round of exhaustion and confusion from watching a spouse slowly succumb to addiction.  It’s also why when he passed away from alcoholism this past summer, I was forced to grieve the loss of the person again, not for myself as I had during the divorce, but for my kids.

Protecting my kids from disappointment was a roll I was intimately familiar with.  At times it all but consumed me. I often felt like I carried a compact and very heavy metal box inside my heart. 

It’s why when I received a call from the police department six months ago that they had discovered his body, and I was at lunch, I didn’t answer it. I knew this was going to be the final disappointment I could not protect them from.

I could feel my body tensing up, preparing to go into my familiar Warrior mode, but  I was tired. The familiar surge of adrenaline I use to call on before launching into “fix, manage and control” mode was not there.   It was all spent from years of actively managing  the complicated roll of being divorced from an alcoholic who still tried to maintain a relationship with his children.

I was now being confronted with a third layer of grief, the layer that’s reserved for absorbing the pain of your children, because that’s what we do as mothers.  It was hard to know what the boys understood and didn’t, especially my younger son who was 15 when his dad died.

They were protective of their father and it wasn’t a conversation they cared to engage in. His health had been on a steady decline since our divorce eight years prior, including a near dear experience two years prior. We were in a state of perpetual limbo, one that became less about wondering whether he would ever recover and resume some semblance of being close to the parent he had been when they were young and more about what was “good enough.”

As I absorbed the news that afternoon, I could feel my body trying to prepare once again to go into Warrior mode, but I was tired. The familiar surge of adrenaline I use to feel was not there. Its course had run.

I’d like to say that I immediately recognized it that afternoon but I did not. I spent the next six months going down a familiar road of fix, managing and controlling their dad’s outstanding affairs, all while also doing my best to absorb the boys’ pain. In the weeks after his death, I found myself in charge of sorting through their dad’s belongings, delivering an impromptu eulogy at his wake, and sorting through his fairly dismal financial affairs that reignited a whole other line of longstanding pain and resentment upon realizing the boys would not be receiving any “legacy’ from their father.

My body was tired. I found myself desiring tranquility. I quit my Cross Fit workouts, something about the adrenaline rush there no longer felt aligned as I shed this old way of being. And I became more physically sick and depleted this past fall then I have ever been in my adult life.

This past week, as I was recovering from my third round of sickness, I found myself in the midst of a tremendous surge of mental and physical release. I was driven to cleanse and clear my house, and that’s when I received the breakthrough I didn’t know was coming.

For so much of my life I defined myself as a warrior, which meant that I was not afraid to confront my pain, or the pain of those I loved. Only I had left out one of the most important parts of being a true warrior——grace. For most of my life, I was a Warrior operating from a place of insufficiency and “not-enough ness.” Going to battle was my compensation. And it was exhausting.

The gift of this Second Chance at mourning was finally releasing me from that form of penance, and in its place offering a new warrior energy, one that forgave both of us our imperfections.