Can Two People Really Grieve That Differently?

How can two people who love each other so much grieve in such utterly different ways. I don’t think there is a person on the planet who doesn’t know that men are different than women. This is why the book Men are from Mars, Women are from Venus was written and the game was created. It is to try to help all of us understand the opposite sex. Personally, I have never read the book but I can just imagine what it says.

Tonight I went outside to gather up more firewood from our backyard. I started a fire earlier today. It has turned cold again outside. I had run through what I had collected earlier and needed more to keep the fire going. I think I have finally learned how to build a pretty good fire. I can get the fire burning and it just feels so warm and cozy. You feel like you could run around in your shorts and a tank top as if you were in the summertime instead of it being 20 degrees outside.

When I went through the door from our office to the garage, I noticed I had left the garage door open from earlier today. Both the light bulb in our garage and the one that illuminates the outside from above our garage door are burned out. For some reason as I was walking down the steps I saw something on the ground to the left of the steps. When I bent down to pick it up, it was a 5x7 picture of our daughter Mariana.

This was a special picture. It was a part of the bereavement package we had received from the picture company Inter-State Studio. They happened to be the company hired in the fall of 2007 to take their fall school pictures. It happens to be her very last fall school picture. We used to live in DeKalb and her teacher, Julie Ahlbach, got a hold of the picture company. She knew they did this special service for parents who have lost a child. It included one 8x10, two 5x7’s, and nine wallets size photographs. Plus they gave us the copyright of the professional photo and put the photo on a CD for us to use however we wish.

I had given this 5x7 photo to my husband. He wanted to take it to work and put it up on his desk. I had asked him if he had done this the day he took it. He had told me he had. I felt like he had lied to me and I was so hurt. I wasn’t really hurt because he had not put the picture up but more because now there was a hole in the bottom of the picture and it was all scuffed up.

I called him up and said he was a liar. I asked him why he had lied to me about putting the picture up on his desk if he had not. Of course, as you can imagine, this started a fight over the phone. I have never accused Keith of lying to me before. He is just not that kind of person. He told me he had put it on his desk that day but did not have a new frame for it. He did not want to put it over one of her older pictures. He got so mad that he hung up on me.

He then called me back about five minutes later and said that he was so angry he now had to talk about it. He yelled at me saying, “What? You don’t think I miss her? You don’t think I want her here?” I knew this was not the case. I knew how much he loved his daughter and utterly missed her. He just never talks to me about her. I am the ONLY one who ever wants or seems to need to talk about her. He is grieving by never wanting to ever talk about her. I am grieving by needing to but nobody wanting to. How can two people who love each other more than life itself come together and be ok? How can we learn to grieve together so that we are there for each other in how the other grieves?

We have tried going to a grief counselor to help us out but that did not work. We have tried to talk about this on our own but that does not work. I guess only time will tell and be able to help us meddle our way through this incredibly difficult time. All I can say is at least we have each other. We may have an incredibly difficult road ahead of us but we will not be doing it alone. He is my other half as I am his. Together we are one.