The Truths My Grieving Heart Rejects

My grieving heart repels the most basic truths like a well-oiled pan repels drops of water. They slide off my mind as unnatural invaders. My sense of reality fights back in rebellion. These truths must drip slowly into my heart because my heart resists them like a foreign attacker. Early on in grieving, and sometimes even years into the grief journey, simple truths…simple facts struggle to register in my mind.
At the beginning, it’s simply the truth that I will never see him again. That fact is unable to absorb into my mind. It’s unthinkable. So permanent. Every fiber of my being scoffs at the ridiculousness of the statement. The shock of opposites; he is here… to in a blink of an eye… he is not. That shock numbs my senses and puts up a wall of denial. He was woven into the fabric of my everyday life. How can those threads suddenly not be there? The tapestry will have gaping holes. The pattern disrupted. The weave unraveled. The weave pattern of my life was built with him. What will it be without him?
The truth that life must go on and I must move forward feels contrary to nature. Oh, I know it’s true in my mind. Sensibility knows the world keeps turning. But my world stopped. The axis shifted. I don’t know how to get this lop-sided world of mine to turn in any orderly way again. It feels unnatural, like the earth spinning backwards with the sunrise being dark and the night blinding my eyes. The truth that one day I will create a new normal or the truth that one day the ache in my heart won’t be all-consuming is like telling a blind person they’ll see the colors of the rainbow. It’s unimaginable.
As people make statements like “It was God’s will” my heart thunders its protest. I don’t mean to combat against God. But the army in my heart stages a boycott. The simple truth feels like an attack of my sensibility. I retreat to the shadows as I struggle to grasp what is infinitely beyond me. It should make me feel better. But right now it can’t. I can’t absorb it yet. All the reasons it “shouldn’t” have been God’s will is what illuminates my mind.
The idea that I could one day be happy without him sounds like lunacy. The mere greeting in the grocery store, “How are you doing today?” makes me fumble for an answer because the average answer of “good” feels like a betrayal to come across my lips. I can’t be good. Not when he is dead. So if that is betrayal, the idea of being good long-term feels like the epitome of it. My heart revolts at the thought. I can’t quite accept this.
The truth that moving forward isn’t going to hurt his feelings… the truth that me smiling isn’t betraying my love for him… the truth that being sad doesn’t prove my affection for him, are some of the hardest truths to absorb. Part of me desperately seeks to honor my love and another part desperately fights to get out of this darkness.
So again, I will say…. My grieving heart repels the most basic truths like a well-oiled pan repels drops of water. They slide off my mind as unnatural invaders. My sense of reality fights back in rebellion. These truths must drip slowly into my heart because my heart resists them like a foreign attacker.