I have taken a twisty path to get to where I’m at today. When I first moved to Eau Claire, a young pup fresh out of high school, my intent was to go to UWEC and graduate with a degree in music therapy. I quickly found out that that wasn’t my calling, so several majors, degrees, and careers later have finally gotten me here.

There was one thing that I learned along the way in one of my music therapy classes that has stuck with me – DABDA, or the five stages of grief. I’m not sure why this has stuck. Perhaps it was just the way it was taught, saying the acronym as a word. Perhaps it’s just one of those things, like in fourth grade when I learned 6 x 8 is really great, 6 x 8 is 48. Maybe it’s like all those 80’s song lyrics that will always take up a little space in my brain even though I can’t tell you what I did five minutes ago. Regardless, there it is, occupying 1% of my brain.

Grief is one of those things that no one is immune to. It is inevitable that at some point you will be affected by death, break ups, lost friendships, loss of a job, a missed opportunity, among other challenges. If you’re one of the lucky ones, grief will not happen often, and will happen at a time in your life when you’re able to best handle it. However, it’s been my experience that it typically occurs when you least expect it and with some types of grief you wonder how you will get through to the other side and be happy again.

If you’ve read some of my previous blogs you know that I am an official, card carrying member of the Dead Dads Club. It happened very unexpectedly and none of us were prepared for it. It’s been almost 20 years since he died, almost a full legal drinking adult, and yet there are days when it still feels like it just happened yesterday.

It’s been 3 years, 3 weeks, and 4 days since joining the Dead Moms Club. My siblings and I were somewhat prepared in that we were told she had 3-5 months, but barely 3 weeks later she was gone. We all thought we had more time.

During my last couple of visits with Mom, when we thought we would have more time to delve into things further, she passed over the reigns of all her genealogy research to me. Fortunately, she had done quite a bit of the work already, and I assumed we would have the summer to map out where I would take over. As you know, that was not the case and now I find myself floundering with honoring her last request. A big factor is that I just haven’t made the time to go through all of her research. When I became the Reference Services Librarian a year after Mom’s death I was happy to utilize the Library’s genealogy resources to familiarize myself with some of what Mom had done. Not wanting to completely reinvent the wheel, but also wanting to learn how to use our resources so I could in turn help our customers, I started playing around with our family tree in Family Search and looking up military records of family members in Fold3. I have only scratched the surface, and have much more work to do, but using the Library’s expansive genealogy resources has become a bridge between Mom’s research and my own journey of discovery. I’m sad that I wasn’t able to show her these resources when she was still alive, but much as birding has become my way to stay connected to Dad, diving into our family stories and doing my part to keep them alive has kept me connected to Mom.

Both losses have greatly impacted me. Dad was young and it was so unexpected that we didn’t know what hit us. He missed out on so much. Mom gained the extra time and extra experiences, but how does one say goodbye, knowing it will be the last? How can we carry on family traditions knowing they will forever be changed?

Through these and other losses, I’ve dealt with them in different ways. There have been a lot of tears and a fair amount of dark humor. I’ve been a big fan of commiserating with a bag of chips, or some Angry Orchard. I’ve wanted to sleep the pain away, and hide from reality. But most days I face it head on knowing that it’s keeping company with those 80’s lyrics.

My intention of this isn’t to bring you down, or to gain your pity, or even be the cliché of be kind to others because you don’t know what storms they’re weathering (although, you should do this). My point is that we are all part of the Broken Hearts Club in some shape or form. We all grieve in different ways so it’s up to each of us to do what needs to be done to get to the other side of existing in a world where (fill in the blank) doesn’t exist.

“Don’t cry because it’s over, smile because it happened.”
– Dr. Seuss

 

 

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