Last nights class was about how to help children we may foster deal with their loss.
It made me realize, I still hadn't fully dealt with the loss of some things even some 20+ years later.
The instructors always ask for volunteers, and I having been a teacher and knowing the wretched sound of crickets chirping when you ask someone to share and answer or for an example from the class and that longggggg silence that comes after, always makes me compelled to raise my hand, for the sole purpose of helping them out, because I feel bad that no one else does.
And...I don't have a problem talking...ask Joey ; )
So last night the question was...think of one object (not a person) but an object that you lost that meant a lot to you, and that you can not replace. After giving us time to think, (and my surprise of the object and memories I thought of), and the ensuing silence after she re-asked someone to volunteer two times, I raised my hand.
She asked what the object was and for me to describe the object in as much detail as possible.
Object description: A gold very thin banded ring with an oblong opal center with a sideways heart surrounding the opal.
(That part went good.)
Then she asked why it was special...this is when it got hard for me (I didn't go into this much detail in class, but since I am remembering it now, so I am going to write the whole story with as much detail as I can remember here..because I realized from the look Joey gave me in class, he had never heard anything about this before...I don't know that I have thought of it since high school)
When my grandaddy was sick with cancer, I stayed with my grandma and grandaddy A LOT!!! He was the main male influence in my life from birth up to the age of 14 when he passed away. He was my strong, safe, loving, cuddling, questioning, interested in every detail of my life, laughing, joking, garage hanging out with and outdoor buddy. He was awesome. In the later stages of his illness when he was in bed sick and could no longer get up and down by himself, I used to lay in bed with him and talk to him, read my Judy Blume books to him, and just keep him company. I stayed there a lot! As absolutely much as my parents would allow me to.
One day we were talking and I was telling him how I was going to have a boyfriend one day, and he was going to love me and buy me a beautiful ring...just like I wanted for this finger! And I held up my finger. Two weekends later when I was back, my grandma said she wanted to talk to me. She had an envelope and on it said, "Melissa Anne--our barbie doll" (that's what they used to call me, because they said I didn't look like anyone in our family, that I was much prettier). She said that my grandaddy wanted me to go pick out and buy the ring that I wanted, because no boyfriend would ever love me as much as him, that I had brought so much joy into his life and been such a help to her and him both, and that I had loved him like none of the other grandchildren, and he wanted me to have something special from him. Inside the envelope was $300.00 (which in 1984 was a lot more today, and a WHOLE LOT OF MONEY TO A 14 year old). I remember my mom and grandma took me to (____? I can picture the store and the jewelry counter but can not for the life of me remember the name of it...and it's gone now_____) and I looked at the rings and found the opal with the heart around it and thought it was the most beautiful ring I had ever seen and the heart reminded me of my grandaddy's love. I fell in love with it, and my grandma paid for it with the money out of the envelope and put the change back in (the ring was less than $100).
I remember getting back to my grandaddy's bed and oooohing and ahhhhing over the ring with him. I loved that ring, and soon after when he passed away it became even more valuable to me.
I lost it in the locker room some years later in high school. (saying this out loud in class last night I started tearing up) I know I know I know...what I am learning more than anything out of this class is that I am a bleeding heart. I THOUGHT I was so much stronger emotionally than I am....or maybe it's that new tender heart that is promised us in Ezekiel. Maybe I did used to be stronger/harder....and I am just now with these classes, actually seeing just how much that part of me has truly melted away.
Then she started asking me how I felt when I looked down and saw it was gone.
Shocked/Scared/Denial
Then later how did I feel when I went back and realized it really was gone, not in the locker, not in the office.
Angry/Mad (at myself and whomever stole it)
Then there was a time of rationale/bargaining:
I thought if I could just get it back, I would put it up and never wear it again, or never take it off again...even for PE.
Then came the depression
The sadness of knowing it was gone, and I was the one who lost it.
Finally: (this is the part of the model I failed at) haha
She asked how long it took for me to accept it. To accept it was gone and there was nothing I could do to get it back.
I told her I still hope to find it someday. I have been back in the locker room when Kaylin was running track and again looked in that locker and the one below it... ; )
The last stage of grief/loss is suppose to be acceptance. F.A.I.L.
I know everyone is different and everyone's experiences and how they deal with things differ and there are MANY MANY different factors that make the above stages faster/easier/longer depending on many many variables, some of which we discussed last night.
But this class did make me look at the death/loss of my own dad and how I handled it in a different way. It did make me see with that hindsight vision (which is so much clearer), that I did go through all of those stages, some for much longer than others even though I had no idea what they were and no one to help me with them. And we even talked about how, once you have "gotten through" each one, they can resurface. A smell, a paintbrush isle for me ;) which I have written of on here, have thrown me right back into that shock/anger/depressed stage even years later and UNEXPECTEDLY!!!
Just like a dinner I cook or a word I say, may do that to a child in our home.
These are the things that kids are going to be going through with feeling the "loss" of their parents while in our care.
I know how I acted as a 34 year old adult losing my dad. Some days I was really ugly, mean, mad...and if I could have gotten away with it, I honestly, myself probably would have done a lot of kicking, biting and hitting during that anger stage, to people who really truly meant well in whatever they said to me at the time, but at the time, it just made me angrier, and made me want to lash out at them and hurt someone else like I was hurting. Of course I didn't, because I had the maturity and life experiences to know better, but it doesn't mean I didn't feel it. As a matter of fact, I did do a lot of screaming...albeit in my car, but I did some screaming alright! There is no telling how a 3, 4, 6, 11 year old may handle that anger stage.
..and we need the tools as a family to be able to handle that.
I was an adult, who could actually process what happened. These kids, some of them, will be removed in the middle of the night, or could even be with us as a result of a primary parents death, or they could be removed from a parent who is kicking and screaming themselves, therefore they will model that behavior with us...and they don't have the maturity or life experiences to be able to rely on or reflect on while going through the grief process.
The class last night made me realize, I need to deepen my own understanding of grief and loss, to best help these kids who are going to have to be dealing with it, by no fault of their own.
*the ring... later after my granddad had been gone for years, my grandma asked where my ring was. I cried. I felt so horrible telling her that I had lost the ring. (It felt like it did last night, having to relive telling that I lost something that was so precious and irreplaceable to me.) My grandma, ohhh my sweet sweet but call it like it is grandma, she just sweetly and gently replied. "I knew you would. I told your grandaddy you were too young to buy you a nice piece of jewelery, that you would lose it and be sad about it...but he insisted, he wanted to do it while he could see your face and see you wear it and enjoy it." She then tells me how very much he loved me.
She told me to follow her and she goes into a drawer in his dresser, in his room (where I slept when I spent the night with her and lived with her for a short time later on) and she pulls out the envelope that says "Melissa Anne-our barbie doll" and hands it to me. She said, "There is the rest of the money from that day. When you feel you are old enough to not lose it, you go buy you another ring from your grandaddy and me, you were such a big help to us both getting through his sickness". Then she reminded me (like she did EVERYBODY for years and years and years and years after to the point I almost felt sorry for people having to hear it so much haha) how once my grandaddy got so sick he couldn't even sit up by himself, I would prop him up and sit behind him with my back to his back to let him sit up for a little while at a time and how for weeks I did this, before he eventually got a hospital bed from hospice..and how he always talked of that, until he could no longer talk.
I did buy another ring, (not identical, it was little sapphires and diamonds shaped in a heart) and I still have it, but it never replaced the one I lost. It was never quite the same, it wasn't the one I laid in bed and oohed and ahhed over with him.
...and I still have that envelope with my grandma's handwriting on it, with a $20 bill of the original money still in it, in my "important document box" with our birth certificates and marriage license and social security cards etc. in it, because, that envelope is still a very important document to me ; )
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