So, I was in the shower washing my hair, and I started to pray for a family I know who is really suffering right now because of the loss of a mother and now the father is sad and wasting away. I was praying for peace for them and then it came to me, that all too familiar 2×4 that often gives me the smack down when I least expect it. Total conviction.

Yesterday I wrote a blog about looking forward to the new year. I really am looking forward to it and I know there are millions of people everywhere just needing a little push to get feeling good and motivated! That is who yesterday’s blog was for.

I also wrote in the post that I wasn’t really thinking about Christmas sadness and why people would get sad over. Hello! I’m a jerk, and if I can, I’ll always be the first to call it out. No one has said anything to me about my flippant comments about grief and being sad at Christmas, but I can’t get it out of my brain right now. I have friends who are sad today. I have friends and family who are losing people they love, and who are being reminded of people they’ve lost.

Two things that make me a jerk.

One, I spent over 20 years in Law Enforcement dealing with death, and pain, and sadness every single day. I’ve had conversations with people who later killed themselves and other family members. I was the last person they talked to. I’ve been the first person a woman talked to after she had just shot her two daughters to death. These things make me a person who isn’t afraid to talk about death, and loss, and terrible fear. I know I’m flippant sometimes because of it. I was also a hostage negotiator and am very comfortable talking about very uncomfortable things. This has made me an easy person to talk to for people involved in grief, but I’m also sometimes unaffected when I should be more sensitive. Two, I’m what my brother helped me name, a hammer. I bull-doze through life like a hammer. If things aren’t working I hammer them out. I smash stuff figuratively. I have felt terrible grief several different times in my life and in a very odd and weird way I’m in a relationship with it. It makes me the woman I am and I depend on it in a bad but good way. Once you’ve been touched by it and changed by it you become a different type of person. Deeply hardened to it and deeply in tuned with it. It’s very hard to articulate. But true to the nature of grief, everyone deals with it differently. I smash that shit with a hammer, while others dance with it in the dark.

To those people who live in it and are experiencing pain and grief today, right now, I’m so sorry I was carless with your heart. I’m sorry I said, “Sorry, wish I could make it better for you.” as though it was a broken nail. I do wish I could make it better. If there was a way I would, but that is the worst thing about grief, no one can make it better. As those on the outside all we can do is hang out next to our people in the middle of it, and pull them up for air as they travel through the drowning, but not killing waters of grief.

I do know for a fact that there will be a brighter day. I promise. It’s at the end of the know-one-knows-how-long road. Keep walking and keep believing. Don’t give up. It wont be the last time, because grief finds us over and over. That’s why when it isn’t at our house, we have to learn to celebrate the moments that are free of it. That’s what I do when I’m not hammering at it. That’s why I’m thankful for new days and new starts.

Again, I’m sorry if I broke a heart or made anyone feel hurt or angry. I’m just a jerk sometimes when I get really excited. I love you.