Fog

Photo by Annie Spratt on Unsplash

I expected grief to hurt.

I expected sadness. Loneliness. The firsts. The empty side of the bed.

I did not expect to lose my mind.

Not in the dramatic way people sometimes say it. Not because I was losing touch with reality.

I mean I lost access to the part of myself I trusted most.

My ability to think clearly. To make decisions. To solve problems. To be competent.

I had always been proud of my mind. I was the person people called when there was a problem to solve. I worked in healthcare. My days depended on quickly assessing situations, organizing chaos, making decisions…and I loved it.

Now I couldn’t remember what I’d been doing for the last four hours.

When Brian’s Aunt Donna and his cousin Kelly arrived in the days following Brian’s death, they began speaking about the “fog” that was coming. Both had become widows themselves in recent years under incredibly traumatic circumstances and were speaking from all too real lived experience. At this point I was so angry and resentful that this “fog” they spoke of sounded like bliss. When they spoke all I could hear was the voice in my head saying “Bring it on.”

Being in a fog sounded like it would provide relief from the anger, the hurt, the fear and the questions that kept playing in my head and would never get answered.

Looking back now, I know that they were trying to spare me, but I wish they had talked more about it. That this “fog” was paralyzing and all consuming. That it could be a whole body experience where everything just felt physically and mentally heavy. That it was an indescribable fatigue that you could feel in your bones. It was a numbness despite feeling unbelievable anger and sadness.

I wish they told me it would get better, but that I may never return back to what I was. Maybe then I wouldn’t have been so surprised by the impact it would have — that as I was mourning my husband I would also end up mourning my brain and my competence.

What strikes me now is that at the time the fog was settling in is exactly the same time the world was asking and expecting everything of me. Changing or removing names on accounts, remembering to pay bills, cleaning up and figuring out what to do with Brian’s belongings. I didn’t want to think about some of these things, and I wasn’t ready to deal with his belongings no matter how many people asked or encouraged me to do so. It got to the point I just said screw it. The bills would get paid, and when I felt like changing the names, I would. If I wanted to keep his belongings, his car, which I did for two years after his death, I would. The standards and expectations could go screw themselves. If I didn’t have Brian’s life neatly wrapped up with a bow in a month, so be it. In fact it felt gross to me that anyone would expect that. He, and his death, were far more than a series of business transactions and the removal of his belongings. Everyone and every institution would survive. I wasn’t ready to not see his name on our checks. So fuck ‘em. The checks were staying as is.

There was one thing that could not wait — re applying to adopt my daughter.

Within 48 hours of Brian’s death Kailie and my DCF social workers were at my home discussing what steps needed to be taken to stabilize Kailie’s placement with me and move the adoption forward…eventually.

Our social workers were kind and compassionate, but there were policies around this kind of thing. First steps - redoing my will and providing detailed financial statements asap that reflected my ability to provide for her on my own. Within two weeks of Brian’s death I was sitting across from our family attorney - a man who had been Brian’s babysitter as a child - signing my will. All as my brain was falling deeper into the fog.

In the following weeks K started her Freshman year of high school and I had not yet returned to work. I would get up and drive Kailie to school and on returning home I was depleted, like I had just used every ounce of my energy and mental ability to get her to school.

Somewhere during those weeks I discovered The Real Housewives of Salt Lake City and Below Deck. They were perfect. They asked nothing of me. No complicated plot. No emotional investment. No thinking. Everything else in my life demanded something I no longer had to give.

I had heard not to make big decisions in the first year after a loss. How is that supposed to work when life doesn’t stop asking? I spent my days trying to imagine what a return to “normal” daily functioning would look like and if I would even be capable. It’s not that I didn’t think I was strong enough to return — it was that my brain and how it functioned was changed.

On July 27, it will be 5 years that I lost Brian. My brain is better, but it has never returned exactly as it was. And yet the world never stopped expecting me to show up fully.

We tell grieving people to take care of themselves.

Then we expect them to return to work.

To make financial decisions.

To parent.

To remember appointments.

To function as though nothing fundamentally has changed.

I have often wondered why the fog of grief isn’t seen as a cognitive injury. Other events that affect the brain, such as a concussion, are recognized as requiring rest, accommodations, and time to heal.

Are the cognitive changes of grief not recognized in the same way because there was no obvious physical cause? Or because the cause of the injury is uncomfortable to discuss?

Those are questions for professionals far more qualified than me to answer. What I do know is that, for me, the impact was real.

My mind is still finding its way out of the fog some days, and I most certainly am not the person who walked into it.

Grief took away the thing I trusted most about myself: my mind.

I am learning to trust the mind that has found its way through the fog. I just know now that it is not immune to heartbreak.