What does grief look like

Friday I got that notice on my Iphone that I didn’t have anymore room on my iphone backup. Is it one drive? I don’t keep up with the names of products anymore. Anyway, I decided to move pictures of my Iphone onto another platform, instead of paying the extra money. I was already paying for dropbox so what the heck.

There was almost a decade of pictures on my Iphone and it brought me back to the days of my late hubby’s death in 2014. The last pictures of my late-hubby were there as he lay on a hospital bed, frail and weak. I don’t like to remember him weak. He was always a strong man both physically and mentally with a crazy sense of humor.

I have had a few years to go through the grief of losing the man that I lived with and loved for twenty-one years. What struck me was how I looked during the time of his death. I thought that I had held it together well. Apparently not.

At the time I was also dealing with complications of a serious disease Wegener’s Granulomatosis and taking immunosuppressants. Because of those complications, I now am on dialysis. I held it together as much as I could, holding the pain tightly. It took me years to release the pain and learn that life was worth living again.

The nurses disliked me in that hospital because I refused to let him die until he was ready. I asked for updates, I asked for help, I asked and asked until the only nurses I saw were the night nurses. I was told that even though I was a patient, I had to control over what they did to him. It was a nightmare.

I finally began sleeping next to him at night to stop one of the nurses or it could have been a doctor, Otto wasn’t clear who it was. The person would sit next to his bed, hold his hand, and tell him he needed to stop the suffering of his family. He needed to die.

When he was ready to die, his family and my brother helped me to find a hospice so he could leave that toxic place. I also had to let him go.

I lost him on September 19, 2014.

The pain that I felt then has dulled. I can now remember his smile and his jokes. I can hear him sometimes when I do something particularly stupid or when I have to deal with another shock like thyroid cancer and dialysis.

What kept me from following him was Foxy. Then in 2014:

And now in 2023:

She is old and frail with cataracts and incontinence. I have to diaper her now. She was the one thing that kept me in the land of the living. Because of her I wrote so many stories and essays. Because of her I wrote my novels. I cared for her, fed her, and held her when she was sick. I nursed her through three bouts of pancreatitis. The first two happened in the first year that she lived with me.

I don’t think grief ever really goes away. It just settles in and becomes a part of you. Eventually I have found other experiences that give me joy. The world is not gray anymore.

What does grief look like?