Emotional Graveyards

I was on my way from grocery shopping and ended up behind a funeral procession. It was the cemetery next to the Walmart my last husband runs. I always referred to it was the "shop till you drop" cemetery. As I sat patiently watching each car turn into the driveway of the cemetery I was thinking how the whole viewing-funeral-internment thing is our way to mourn publicly. We have lost someone important and we go through all these things to show how much we loved them and will miss them. Everyone looks at you with the knowledge that something big and sad has happened in your life. They avert their eyes, give a second or to of extra consideration and always try to say something kind about your lost loved one and something to bring hope to your grief. As a whole, its a wonderful outlet of public sadness.

As the last car turned and I was allowed to continue on my way home I began to wonder. If there were such things as emotional graveyards how many of the cars on the road would be on their way there with their blinkers on waiting to turn into the driveway? How nice it would be to be able to publicly be recognized as grieving. Have people look at us and just know "she's lost someone....she is sad, smile and say something nice." Validate our pain. Let us cry at the drop of a hat and not ask why. Bring a casserole over afterward.....hey we all need to eat!

We lose a relationship that is important to us. A dream. A belief. And we just have to get up and get on with things. There is no ceremony for us. No one can even tell the kind of death we have experienced or if we try to explain many people will not give it the gravity it should have (we believe it should have) . Its heartache without a body. Its not tangible. We can't gather around a casket and see the loss. We can only feel it individually. No casserole.

Walking wounded. Angry, mournful. Perhaps the bars are where we go to publicly mourn? The candy store? Underneath the covers of a bed we won't rise from? Tears that betray us when we are trying to read a bedtime story to our children? We struggle up for air and pray for the day it doesn't hurt when we breathe. And no one knows it. And the day it doesn't hurt? No one knows that either. Its a silent struggle with a silent healing. From the outside no one ever knows we just got back from the cemetery.