The Fog

I haven’t and may not write about the great loss that Lucy and I had to endure last week. I will say that Fred is perfectly healthy and all is well with my friends and family. However, something tragic did occur. Last Tuesday. That will affect the three of us for sometime.

I think we just got caught off guard. Too used to things going our way and forgetting that in each life there are days when you wonder how you will ever make it to the next. Like a fog the pain begins to form around you slowly until all you see and feel is emptiness. You scream into the gray clouds for anyone…someone to make things better or take you back to a time when another choice could have been made…

As far as how we reacted, I can only speak for myself. I stopped talking. It seemed silly and embarrassing to be grieving so much over what others might consider simply another day in the life of. I took a day off work and just lay on the couch covered with my grief. Snuggling up to it and peering out around the edges whenever the phone rang. When I did speak to someone other than Lucy, the words were dull and seemed to trail off at the end. I would open my mouth and the fog would quickly choke me until I once again fell silent. For a week I have gotten up, gone to work, come home…I have continued on with all the day to day routines that make up my life…except I have done them in silence. Moments with Lucy and Fred being the only times when any reaction or sound could be heard from me.

We decided to stick with plans made months before and went out of town last Saturday. Nothing special just a short drive through the country to a crafts festival/ yard sale we have been going to every year as far back as I can remember. It was there that we began to see breaks of sunlight and feel the numbness slowly going away. Then just as the day was about to be over, a chance encounter…a one in a million coincidence blinded us to all that we had fought so hard to get past. The fog returned.

By chance I woke last night and just happened to peer out the window. Maybe I was being a bulldog, ensuring that my home and those in it were safe from the evil that surely lay in the shadows of the pine trees or lurked in the cars driving by. Whatever the reason; all I saw was fog. It was as if the pain and loss had become too much for Lucy and I to bear and that it simply burst through the very walls of the house covering the whole world in white. It was there when I woke up this morning…the fog. It lasted all day today. Through my drive to Fred’s daycare, on my way to work, coming back tonight as I write this.
Except for some reason, today for the first time I began to speak again. As if the fog had really come from inside me and by seeing it all around I was able to begin the process of filling the empty space inside with something other than pain and sadness. I still hurt, still fight the tears during some parts of the day…but not all day.