Wednesday, September 17, 2014

The baseball bat of grief

I'm sure you've heard the expression, "(such and such) hit me like a baseball bat"? Well that happened to me today.

At work.

I was plugging away at my job, blissfully listening to my iPod while churning out the stuff I needed to get done. Then it hit me, you guessed it, like a baseball bat: Grief. Hit me and hit me hard.

I love music, and I've been lucky that music hasn't been a big grief trigger for me since Aimee's death. But there's one song that always gets to me, "Dancing in the Minefields", which Aimee always loved. Turns out, that song came on my iPod, and I was so focused on my work that my conscious brain didn't notice. But my subconscious brain did, and eventually it came crashing through to my consciousness and I began to feel a huge wave of grief start to hit me, to the point that I felt tears coming.

I work in an open office, meaning there are no walls between any of us, so I quickly got up and went to one of the private meeting areas to let the moment wash over me and, eventually, pass.

Aimee's death was a little less than three years ago. I'm recently remarried, and quite happy in how my life is going right now. But I know that when it comes to grief, it never fully goes away.

If you lose an arm, you'll eventually learn how to live a happy, normal life without it. But there will still be days when you really miss that arm.

With someone you loved like I loved Aimee, it's much, much worse than an arm.

Sometimes, I really miss her. There are moments when the pain of her death hits me as if it was just days ago and not years. And I know that will probably always be the case, that there will be these moments where the baseball bat of grief comes along and hits me upside the head.

(If you're curious about the song, here's a link to it on YouTube: http://youtu.be/_Gs3fg_WsEg)
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Photo credit information:Author: Jeff RuaneAuthor URL: https://www.flickr.com/people/eioua/
Title: hung up, pt. II
Year: 2008
Source: Flickr
Source URL: https://www.flickr.com
License: Creative Commons Attribution License
License Url: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/
License Shorthand: CC-BY


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