Sadness, snuggles......sleep

I have found in the last three (plus) months that children's grief does not follow the same winding path that widowhood does.  Their grief is more like hairpin turns.  They seem fine one moment then desperately sad, angry or tearful the next, and within minutes they can be giggling again.  I am almost jealous of the way they can do that.

Last night was one of those hairpin moments with my 10 year old.  She was overwhelmingly sad, crying uncontrollably and saying that she wanted her Daddy.  That in itself was awful, but it got worse.  She said that she wished that she had never been born.  When I asked her why, she said that if she hadn't been born that her dad would have never gotten cancer.  What?!?  I immediately said to her "You know that it wasn't your fault that Daddy died, right?"  She said "Yes it is!  I didn't love him enough!  I didn't talk to him enough because he was always so cranky!"  As I snuggled into bed with her, I told her that there was nothing that any of us did to make him die, and there was nothing that we knew of that would have saved him.  I reminded her of how on the day he died she sat with him and held his hand and told him she loved him.  I reminded her of how he squeezed her hand while she talked to him, and that I knew he could hear her.  I told her how MUCH her Daddy loved her.  Can you IMAGINE the guilt this little one has been feeling?  It was heart wrenching to think that she has been blaming herself for all this time.

She settled down and started talking about the last big trip we took as a family, which was to Disney World, Universal and Sea World.  She quietly remembered how her dad sat next to her on every scary ride and held her hand.  Shortly thereafter she was giggling at another memory of her dad.  I laid there next to her, snuggling and dozing off myself, until she finally fell asleep.  As I climbed out of bed I asked Brian to please come to her in a dream and let her know how much he loved her.  This morning when she got up she came to me smiling and told me she had the BEST dream.....no, it wasn't Brian, she dreamed that she was a mermaid swimming with dolphins.  I'd like to think, though I know this is a stretch, that swimming weightless through the water as a mermaid means the enormous weight of that guilt has been lifted from her. 

I know that in the next months and certainly for years to come that I will encounter these hairpin turns with my children.  They too are grieving, they are just better at setting it aside and LIVING while they do so.