As we find ourselves in year three…

It dawns on me that little has changed. I remember like it was yesterday waking up on the 2nd of December 2021 to the nightmarish realization that Charlie’s death wasn’t a dream. I realized at that moment that, without the responsibility to wake her for school, I literally had no reason to get out of bed. She was the reason I got up each day. 

Ever since then, mornings have been a struggle for me and it hasn’t gotten any easier with time. I can’t fall asleep at night and I can’t wake up in the morning.

I have always needed more sleep than the average. My husband, Carl has always said that if sleeping were an Olympic sport, I’d be a shoe-in for gold. Frustrating as it must be for those who struggle to sleep to hear this, it is actually difficult to be like this. Even just in the past few weeks, I have slept into the early afternoon multiple times. Without an alarm to wake me, and sometimes even with, I rarely wake before midday and sleeping through till 3pm is not unheard of.

This is one of the many symptoms of grief that I still live with.

Grief like this doesn’t get easier. It doesn’t fade with time. It is part of us. It changes us, in dreadful ways and, sometimes, in positive ways too. There are so many symptoms of traumatic grief that are seldom discussed, and probably not even well documented. I know of others with physical manifestations of their trauma like tinnitus and headaches. On the first anniversary of Charlie’s death, my ankle flared up in a way never before experienced. I have had intermittent inflammation ever since. My mother-in-law has also changed tremendously, how much due to covid, age or grief, we’ll never know. But we can’t help but wonder how we all might be different if Charlie were still here.

It’s all the crummy effects of losing a child that drive some of us forward. It’s almost certainly the driving force behind the lifestyle changes I have made this year. I think there’s some truth to the fact that no amount of physical pain can ever even touch the emotional toll of trauma like this. So even as I have cut out alcohol, and my beloved chocolate, cookies, and desserts, I don’t mind. I’m driven by the need for change and change I will, even if I have to be a little bit obsessive about it. 

Now if I could only just wake up in the morning.