After the Raging Storm

The wind blows, and I’m inside, sheltered from its intensity. I live in a windy place where storms travel across the North Sea and greet me. Sometimes the raging winds howl outside, and I wonder if my windows will break to admit the destruction into this home. At other times it is a softer wind that I hear, and I can look outside to see the umbrella cover being moved: that is how I know there is wind outside.

Beyond the walls of my home, the storms can rage. There are times that mental storms rage for people, and the fix or cure is to talk them out. Sometimes you need a professional to do the listening, and to provide the safety of shelter from the storm.

Grief can rage with an intensity, and at the same time can be the quiet storm that calls us to a peaceful reflection. I’ve experienced both sides of the storm. I’ve known the intensity of the wind as I feel it might break through all of me and leave me splattered on the ground.

I remember a night early on in the process where the storm raged outside of my home, and inside it brought up the question: How will I survive this alone? I raged at myself, at Jon, and at God. The rage wasn’t about how this could happen to me. The rage was about the unknown I was facing. At the time, it was November, and his death had been in late August. I was waking up to what was. I was raging at myself because I was now alone. A disabled person who had relaxed into having another person present to help when I needed a pair of eyes that worked well. Now he was gone and I thought to myself that I’d been foolish to relax my independence. I’d become lazy in relying on him. NO MORE.

I raged at Jon for exiting and honoring his own need to not live through another psychotic episode that would take years to walk out from. Yet, in that rage, I knew the trauma that he had chosen to avoid. It would have been too much for him, and too much to ask me to hold as I cared for him. At the end of his life, I was suffering from compassion fatigue. I wasn’t in a good place.

I was raging at God because I could safely let God hold my rage. This wasn’t about God. God didn’t do anything to me or to Jon. That is not a God I could ever believe in. I just needed to rage on that stormy night. It was enough. When the tears faded out and the body stopped shaking, I was able to rest in the bed we had shared. It was a beginning of closing out the old and entering a new space where that bed would be replaced for something that was all mine.

The bedroom went from a milk-chocolate brown to an ice blue.

I purchased the new bed on a stormy day. That night, sirens blared at accidents that had happened. The snow stayed for days, and I hunkered down as the powerful wind howled beyond my office, rattling the windows, and I wondered if I’d survive it all. Somewhere out there, the storm I was surviving was raging in someone’s head. By then, the head storm of that November night in 2016 had passed, and I understood that I could do what I had to do if I was smart about it. Jon’s storm had ended, and my storm had begun.

We’d talked about how his suicide would hurt me, and others. We’d talked about it in the very room I slept in. He knew what it would do to those left behind. I couldn’t hold it against him, because to stay would have meant suffering mental terror that no one should suffer. Psychosis is traumatic.

When you are in the storm or trauma, you can’t look to the edge and see much hope. This is why grief can be the unwelcome storm that rages out of control. We have no control over any of it. We can manage some of our behavior as we gain experience in meeting the winds. We are not in a place to stop any of it. Storms, by their nature, tend to blow themselves out when they finally get to a point of dying down.

Grief by its own nature will calm itself when we allow our bodies and souls to do the work that must be done. We navigate harsh waters; we travel underground, and we bore through mountains. In the end, we stand on new ground.

The rage inside and outside has stopped. We question how it happened, and we can conclude that the process of it all, while useful to understand, isn’t needful to focus on. In many ways it is enough to respect the wind for its power to carry us to a new place in life where we come to believe that we can face the other storms that come our way.