They say I should be grateful for stuff. My wife died at 27 and they expect me to somehow fathom being capable of feeling gratitude. I go to several bereavement groups that meet locally, and they are beating me up about this gratitude shit. I'm feeling the opposite of grateful. Not 'ungrateful,' something much less grateful than that.
And yet.
I know it could be worse! It could always fucking be worse, couldn't it? Isn't that amazing? Life...can always get worse! Death remains a fairly level line, but life can somehow always get worse!
What pisses me off the most is that things can actually get better, too. There's always a chance. I guess it's hard for me to think about there being a chance for life to get better after hearing the doctors tell me my wife had a chance to pull through and look how that turned out.
But still.
Can I be grateful for, if nothing else, the things that haven't gotten worse YET? Can I allow myself to feel that bit o' grateful they all want me to feel? I suppose. I hadn't considered that. At my bereavement group yesterday, the facilitator passed around a dish full of smooth, colored stones she said we could use as a reminder to have gratitude when you can. I picked one that reminded me of my wife, of course, a mottled purple and black pebble the size of the tip of my thumb.
Today, I got a dirty look from a thuggish-looking stranger for absolutely no reason in a parking lot. It kinda made me laugh. And I had my gratitude stone. And about 15 minutes later, I realized that if that had happened back before my wife died, that grimace would've left me shaken. But the worst thing I could've ever imagined happened October 15th, 2015. I'm really not scared of that petty crap anymore.
Thank you for loving me, baby. I'm -- wait for it -- grateful.
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I hope you brought enough comment to share with the whole class!