A Step Back

So, even though it has been more than five months since Scott’s death, I feel like I have taken a step back in the grieving process.  I have felt up until this point that we have made good progress in our grief journey, getting to the point where the emotions weren’t simmering on the surface or just below the surface.  Yet for the past week I have felt those emotions surging back to the surface.  I feel tears in my eyes at the smallest, insignificant little things, including things that have nothing to do with Scott’s death or my grief.  I have realized even more how being in the grief journey leaves me with no emotional reserves to deal with things that ordinarily I would be able to take in stride.  I’m talking about things both in my personal life and at work.  I find myself less able to ride out the emotional bumps at work that are a normal part of the professional life of a foster care worker at a county Children and Youth office.  I have had many times in the past five months that I have doubted my ability to do the best job at work, despite my best efforts, times that I have felt truly inadequate to face the tough situations.  The challenge of this grief journey is that I feel like I am on the edge of the breaking point most of the time and just don’t realize it until a new challenge or bump in the road comes along.  The secondary challenge in all of this is, if I don’t recognize how close I am to the edge of the breaking point of my emotions and am functioning “normally,” how can anyone else recognize that?  I am reminded over and over again of a quote that I read recently that talked about (and I’m paraphrasing here) although I may have a smile on my face, be functioning normally, and acting like everything is fine/normal, this doesn’t mean that my heart isn’t breaking on the inside.  I am reminded over and over again how everyone grieves differently.  If I have learned anything in this journey, it is to be more gentle with those who have lost, and just because someone might grieve differently than I am, that doesn’t mean that the loss is any less or any greater than mine.  Everyone brings different coping skills to their own grief journey.  I hope that as I have learned this in my journey, that others will recognize this as well.  I hope that as I have learned to be more patient with people who are grieving and their responses to situations, that others will recognize that a grieving person may not respond in a "normal" way to different situations, simply because of that lack of emotional reserve/strength available to draw upon.