The Danger of the Fast-Forward Button

My ability to hold other people’s pain and frustration is significantly less than it once was. I want to feel for other people, but I just can’t. I guess this is because I can barely hold my own emotions throughout the day. Grief has made me into a more selfish person – a person who is more likely to reach inward than outwards on days like today.

I don’t want to be sad anymore. I want to wake up and play music really loudly like my dad always did as we were growing up. I want to sing and dance around the house to that music and I want to pick my kids up and spin them around. I want to laugh really hard with my friends and I want to do all of this every day, not just on special occasions.

In this post from the spring of 2018, I imagined that in six months or a year or two years I might be able to feel more positive emotions. I couldn’t really picture my future, but I hoped – God, I hoped – that things would be better someday.

And damn I wanted to leapfrog to that day. I didn’t know how to get to a better place when I was three months into widowhood. I just knew I wanted to get out of where I currently was.

Early grief is really, really terrible.

So what if it were possible? What if I could have just skipped over the grief and gotten to a better place? Wouldn’t everyone choose that?

From my vantage point now, I can say this: I’m not so sure that would have been the right choice.

Listen, I’m not saying that people should suffer unnecessarily. There were times that I felt like I really Could. Not. Go. On. and I wouldn’t wish those kind of days on my worst enemy. I do wish I could have skipped those days.

But there’s a danger in the fast-forward button. It doesn’t actually exist, of course, but there are ways to try and fast-forward through grief. I mean, you can ignore it. Plenty of people do this by hiding away all evidence of the person who died, and burying their feelings. I think most people are enlightened enough in 2020 to know that this is not a very good way to deal with grief.

But there are other ways to try and “get better” quickly. I know – I tried all of them. I thought if I found the perfect therapist, she could get me to a better place. So I spent hours and hours seeing almost a dozen new therapists in a quest to “fix” myself. I also read every single thing I could about grief, throwing myself down rabbit holes of internet videos and crazier blogs than mine. I did EMDR and yoga and even a meditation grief group. I just wanted to get through the grief. I wanted a fix for the pain.

In the end, the fix wasn’t any one thing – it was all of them. But most important, it was living with the grief and letting time pass that helped me heal.

There’s a Japanese type of art called Kintsugi, which means “golden joinery” and is the process of putting broken pieces of pottery back together with bits of gold. The resulting piece is whole again, and considered even more beautiful than it was before it was broken.