The asters are blooming, fall is coming.

Grief is a strange creature, even when you know it's coming, it's still so painful.  You would think that the last two years of grieving for the man who was slowly leaving us would have been enough, but no, the grief that I feel this week is fresh and painful.  I also thought, he's my father in law, I've only know this man for seven years, it won't hurt as much, but none of that mattered.  The fresh grief arrived on Monday night, my body slowed down, I kept crying, everything became more difficult.  My poor husband is overcome with grief.  His back seized up and now he's sick.  Grief will not be ignored.  It insists it be dealt with, one way or another.

The grief my husband and I feel is complicated by his fractured family, who all hold their anger close to their hearts, as if that's all they have left of their family.  We were made to feel deeply unwelcome by my sister in law when we last visited my father in law.  She threatened to have me removed from the room, my sin, touching her father.  The funeral will be no different and we have decided to remember Art in our own way.  My husband made peace with his father in the past year and so did my brother in law.  Attending a funeral where nobody will awknowledge us will just cause more pain, not attending the funeral will mean that we are as awful as the family thinks we are.  There is no way to win this, except to care for ourselves. 

In the last month, my grandson was retraumatized by his mother, my daughter was retraumatized by her father and I came up against some very visceral anger directed towards me, because I was married to my husband.  Anger is something I'm very familiar with, having grown up with an angry father, but I'm learning to understand it better.  The anger of others usually has nothing to do with me.  It exists in the other person and I am merely someplace to dump that anger.  I do it myself and always feel badly afterwards.  This week I have been angry and then stop myself, it's grief I remind myself, you're not angry at the person in the car in front of you.  Sometimes that works, sometimes I just get angry and swear, a lot.

My daughter is getting therapy to help her deal with her father's anger, which has nothing to do with her.  My grandson will be starting therapy next month to help him deal with his mother's anger, which has nothing to do with him.  And me, I'm learning to trust my gut, to believe what I feel and to understand that another's anger is about them, not me.  My sister in law can hold her anger as close as she wants; I know that it will only keep others away.  I've seen it in my own family and I've experienced it myself.  It seems that anger keeps you safe, it's big, it's scary, and it feels empowering.  But what anger really is a fortress of solitude for a person to sit in, by themselves, nursing old wounds.  Anger pushes everyone away and ultimately destroys relationships.  It's not how I want to spend my remaining days.