Grief is Love Not Wanting to Let Go

 Grief is a tricky thing. Everyone copes differently, and in a house of six people, it ebbs and flows and sometimes crashes hard.  The most difficult thing is knowing how to support the people you love who are hurting the most.

My husband lost his dad on Saturday. He was a brilliant, kind, funny, sharp man when I met him almost fourteen years ago. He was still all of those things the last time I saw him in late 2022. The sharpness had dulled a bit due to his disease (similar to Parkinson's), but I could still see the twinkle in his eye at times. I saw the love and pride when he looked at his son and grandkids. 

Knowing how to support my kids is relatively easy for me. I may not have wanted four kids when I was 18 years old and thought I'd be a tortured author living in a studio apartment in New York City. But I'm glad God always has a better plan than I do, because being their mom is my greatest blessing (and biggest headache depending on the day). I know how each of them responds to crisis. How they respond to stress and big feelings. I know how to love them through it. 

My husband is a different animal. He's the strong one in our relationship in the most visible ways. He stands by my side when I go through difficult emotions, even if he doesn't always understand them, he loves and accepts that I am a highly emotional person. He is not highly emotional. He is a very hard egg to crack on the emotional front. To see him breaking down over this loss, that was gut-wrenching for me. I feel the need to come in and protect him, to shield him from other things so he can process this loss in his own way, on his own time. He's not someone who rushes things, and he's probably not even completely dealt with 5% of the emotions he's going to feel over the next several weeks and months and maybe even years. 

As Earl Grollman said, "Grief is love not wanting to let go." 

I promise we won't let go of the memories we have of you, Julio. I promise we will all do our best to feel the sadness, but not let it consume us, and we'll support each other along this new journey we haven't had to navigate yet as a family. Thank you for making my husband a strong, good, hard-working man. You will be missed.