November

November is not a happy time of the year for me. Our birthdays have wound down for the year, Christmas is looming, which always brings a lot of extra stress for me. November also is a time of loss for my family.

My grandad passed away November 9, 2010. This was the first time in my life I had ever experienced loss firsthand. I wasn’t young. I was 25, with two kids of my own. But my grandad was seriously LIFE. He was my everything good in the world, bigger than life in my opinion. I had been his caretaker since he had stopped driving about two or three years prior. He was in assisted living, and my grandma had accompanied him there so they could be together. Out of the blue, completely unexpected, I got a phone call one morning about 7 am. He had a pulmonary embolism and I needed to get to the hospital ASAP. We made the decision not to give any more treatment- he had been without oxygen for over seven minutes. At 81 years old, there isn’t really any more to do. The next months are literally a fog that couldn’t be lifted. I don’t remember the funeral. Its completely gone. Not who I spoke to, not who was there. Nothing. Driving home from work around midnight, I would just feel like I couldn’t breathe all of sudden. Apparently I was having panic attacks.

Eventually the fog does lift, and though nothing ever goes back to normal, you kind of go to a “new” normal of sorts. I did have a few breakdowns, the most memorable is when the older man in the same aisle i was in at Walmart was wearing the same cologne. Yea I sobbed like a baby right there in that aisle. But that extreme ache begins to fade, and now when I smell that scent it just brings back wonderful memories.

November 14, 2017 was the day my grandmother left us. It was a bittersweet day. We had known it was coming for a long time, and it was honestly sort of a relief. Alzheimer’s had wrecked her mind and her body, and she was a shell of the grandmother I had known my whole life. My grandmother, the one I had spent the night with every Saturday, stayed up way too late, and played rummy with all the time, had really been gone for a long time. I realized, that night as we were calling the funeral home- she had died the second tuesday in November. Same as my grandad. We buried them both on a Thursday.

My ex-husband’s granddad also passed away, November of 2018. It was not the magnitude of losing my grandparents, but my children felt it immensely, and that made me hurt as well. They have felt quite a bit of loss in the last two years.

So as we once again are in November, with Christmas decor going up, and plans being made for the season, there is a sense of loss and darkness that envelopes me. I struggle to break free of it. I try to take the sun in daily, feel it on my face. I hate the darkness, the cold. All I can do is hold on to the rollercoaster for dear life and pray. Pray for Christmas, then the New Year, and soon spring- when the warmth and sun and good days return.