My First Session with the Grief Counselor

I like Diane. She’s a very down-to-earth woman who, pretty much, tells it like it is. I will probably see her a couple of times from now until January and then, once my insurance benefit kicks back in, I’ll begin seeing a grief counselor who takes my insurance. Diane doesn’t take any insurance, which is fine. If I don’t find a counselor that I like as much as or better than her, then I will just continue going to her without insurance. She’s worth it. I'm afraid of leaving Clay. There's a part of me that loves our sessions together and a part of me that needs and feeds off of our sessions together. I feel very sad thinking about never seeing him again. Everything feels like grief, now.

When I sat down she asked me to tell her what happened and as usual, I began the story, employing my tough exterior, and I gradually morphed into a sopping puddle of grief.

I told her how I feel punished by God and that I fear it will happen all over again with the next man I meet and fall in love with. She put an interesting rebuttal on the notion, pointing out all of the days leading up to the diagnosis and asking me if I ever think about how I wasn’t punished on all of those days. She’s right, of course. I felt some of my pain melt away.

I confided in her about all of the conversations I have in my apartment with people who aren’t even there. I constantly talk to people, dead or alive, when I’m at home and I usually think I am losing my sanity. Who does that? Who talks out loud when they’re all alone to people who aren’t even there? Diane said, “You spent years talking to your husband who was there with you to hear all of the things you said and felt and now he’s gone. You’re just doing what you’re used to doing.” I loved her for saying that.

Diane really knows what I have been through and how it feels for me now. Her husband died eighteen years ago when she was only thirty-one years old. She knows. There is nothing more valuable to me than that. She soothed my pain with her understanding.

We laughed a lot and I cried a lot and I felt like a fetus safely enveloped in her womb.

She asked me if I ever put aside time to allow the grief to come on full force and I told her that I have been trying to stop doing that because nobody is going to understand that I am still crying after two years. She said what Clay always says. Two years is very early in the grief process. It’s going to take a long time to process everything that has happened. I hated her for saying it but she knows. She has been through it and she knows.

She equated my grief to an injury that has left a huge scar on me. She said that scar is going to be with me always and even though it will heal and get better with time, it will never go away. She described grief as a fancy set of china she takes out on special occasions. This set of china, she uses and always hand-washes and puts away until she needs it again. She said that after eighteen years, she can pull the grief out when she wants to and put it away when she needs to.

I hate my grief. I want to put it away and never take it out again.