It is “that time of year” again. The fall holidays are already being overshadowed by Santa. I had a mini panic attack when I turned the corner in Costco and walked into a Christmas tree…in September! Ugh. Is it another Thanksgiving without my mom and dad already? Is it the dreaded month of December again? Am I almost two years away from my husband? 

Erik is forever frozen in my mind at the stove on our last Thanksgiving, lecturing me for making too many side dishes for our one little oven. I made him go back and forth to my sister’s house to use their oven too. He was sweating and swearing by the time we all sat down to eat. 

Little did I know that a week later he would lovingly put up the Christmas tree for me and he would be gone forever the next day. That tree sat undecorated in the background of our family trauma that December.

I remember laying on the floor writhing in tears together with my kids and that freaking tree was just standing over us as if to remind me, “he was literally just standing right here last night.” So I kind of hate Christmas now if I am being honest. I want to leave now and return in January.

Writing that down feels good. I hate Christmas everyone! LOL. I explained to my therapist recently that the only way I can describe “how I am doing” at this point is through written words. So thank you dear reader (nod to Bridgerton) for being a witness to my journey. 

The literary metaphor for my grief at the moment is that I am just an art museum filled with separate gallery rooms in the featured exhibit of my life. The rooms in this museum are where my soul resides. I can move freely around from room to room observing, remembering, feeling what I see. I can stop and sit and stare for a while or I can just pass through the still frames of my life. 

In one room there is my childhood where I can see the many versions of my youth and the memories of my parents. This is Allison McCarthy. There is also a room filled with my life with my husband and our three children. This room is where my identity belonged to motherhood and marriage and where I became Allison Setterlind. 

And there is an unfamiliar room that I continue to visit daily. I stare at this gallery each morning when I roll my hand over the cold vacant side of the bed where my warm partner used to awaken beside me. It takes me a few brutal minutes to ground myself in reality every morning without fail. 

In this room, I am still named Allison Setterlind, but now this name sounds foreign to me. I want to be alive and present in this room, while I also want to cry and hide. This widowed version of me feels so sorry for those other versions of me who never saw her life turning out this way. 

That is the invisible pain of year two for me. Moving on with new pictures, people, and memories while also more quietly than ever…grieving.  

I thought about this concept of “invisible pain” while I was caring for my daughter after a pretty intense spinal surgery this month. I watched the various nurses try to gauge her pain in the hospital. This kiddo is an athlete who has endured not only constant back pain for a year, but also the gut wrenching kind of pain only deep grief can inflict.

How would they know she needed their help if all they saw was her cute little face politely asking for morphine? I told the nurse not to look at her demeanor for answers. She is really good at carrying her pain but she is definitely suffering. 

There is a saying, “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a battle.” If only we could all walk around the world with a hospital pain scale of 1-10 on our shirt so we could just point to how we truly feel on our bad days. Grief is an invisible constant chronic pain. It always hurts. 

Sometimes it is still a 10 for me, like when I saw the damn Christmas trees out before Halloween. I had the Game of Thrones foreboding words in my head, “Winter is coming.”  It sucks navigating this pain in silence in the middle of the Costco granola bar aisle. 

But I know how to move through these moments better now. I know how to sit in the hole and I know how to climb out now. I am thankful for this adaptive kind of personal growth. However, losing Erik to suicide is something I still cannot allow myself the kind of grace I need to fully recover. I am not ready to forgive myself for what the world constantly reminds me was a preventable death.

So right now I am just focused on survival and honoring him with my best attempt at a good life for all of us left behind. And I am working on my pain tolerance to keep this smile on my face because I really can’t afford Botox for the frown lines ya’ll.