Like a Ton of Bricks

It hit me like a ton of bricks today.  It was as if it had just happened.  Driving around doing some errands I pulled into a parking spot, it occurred to me that it has been seven months today since my mother's death.  The way I felt at that moment was akin to how I felt the moment I heard the news.  My breath left my body and I cried from the deepest part of my soul.  I sobbed.  My poor daughter didn't know what to do.  And just as quickly as the grief overcame me, the tears left and I was able to go do what I needed to do.  If someone had told me, before she died, that I would still feel the intensity of grief seven months later, I would never have believed them.  Yet, here I sit with a remnant of what I felt earlier.  A dark, sad cloud hanging over my head.

I have not heard my mother's voice in over seven months, and never will again.  That has been the hardest pill to swallow in all this...it's the forever bit.  How do people do it?  How has my father gotten up day after day, doing things he has never had to do for  himself - those very things a constant reminder of his wife's absence.  A constant reminder of the pain of loss and grief.  

I have described my experience with grief as the tide, coming in and going out.  The tide came in today as a tidal wave.