“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” – Joan Didion

I’ve been educating myself on grief, recently, and it’s exhausting. Turns out that I never grieved my diagnosis, not really. It helped that I fell in love with a redheaded golfer, married him, then got divorced. The bandaid holding my emotions together just ripped away. My dreams of being a mother, of fighting this disease with a partner, of maximizing my energy for the greatest good – all gone. Hello grief, I’m Sunny. Welcome to the main stage.

“We are imperfect mortal beings, aware of that mortality even as we push it away, failed by our very complication, so wired that when we mourn our losses we also mourn, for better or for worse, ourselves. As we were. As we are no longer. As we will one day not be at all.” – Joan Didion

I’ve lost 3 people in my ALS circle in the last couple of weeks. That’s a reality that is hard to accept. I mourn for them, the futures they always dreamed of having. My heart is broken for their families, their spouses and children. Their influence on our ALS community has been an immediate punch to the stomach. Selfishly, I miss my friends. What happens when it’s my turn to go? Will this flood of emotions even matter? Where else should I be focusing this energy so that when I’m no longer able to function independently I’ll be proud of my prior accomplishments?

“Grief is different. Grief has no distance. Grief comes in waves, paroxysms, sudden apprehensions that weaken the knees and blind the eyes and obliterate the dailiness of life.” – Joan Didion

This wave is tough, tough stuff. Just as tough and headstrong as I usually feel, today I’m feeling like goo. Today would have been 4 years that Kenneth and I were married. I’m in my dream home, in my favorite small town, with my cuddly boys and exactly where God called me to be. Still, I grieve what should have been. I miss being a wife.

“The contemporary trend was “to treat mourning as morbid self-indulgence, and to give social admiration to the bereaved who hide their grief so fully that no one would guess anything had happened.” – Joan Didion

So here I am self-indulging. Wearing my heart and my flaws on my sleeve. Call it a cry for attention but I’m a grieving divorcée with a terminal disease. I’ll be better aligned tomorrow, but today I’m having a pity party. Always check on your strong friends, we need support too.

Here’s the book I referenced: The Year of Magical Thinking https://www.amazon.com/dp/1400078431/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_fabt1_jlFRFbYBA29EN