Senior Year!!!! I made it!!! I had my cocoon of friends around me - those that hadn't graduated the previous year. I had spent two weeks at Stephen F. Austin State University at a their Summer Theatre Workshop for the second summer in a row. My school sent two students each summer based on grades and performance in Theatre Arts. I was the first person to be selected to go two years in a row. I know Mr. Mangrum had something to do with it because of what I had gone through the year before.
Mags and I had our college plans all made and were set to have an awesome year. I know it was a good year, but to be honest, I don't really remember it. I was kindof working on auto pilot.
I had yet to grieve for my father, but I didn't know this was the problem. I wasn't even aware that there was a problem until my mother realized that I hadn't gotten my monthly visitor in a long, long time. I was taken to the doctor, but there was nothing physically wrong with me. It wasn't until the Dr. asked me if I had thought about suicide that I realized I had been thinking about it. Welcome to the psychiatric department. Here comes the long questionnaire, all the questions and my mother telling the shrink that my father had died the previous December. Here we go.
These are the stages of grief - which one do you think you are on? I wasn't on any of them. I had gotten over it and moved on with life - that's what I do. Can I change it? No? Carry on then. But, wait, wasn't I angry at my father for dying? Why should I be? He didn't choose to die. Was I angry with God for taking my father? Why should I be? God puts us on earth to serve a purpose, and when we have fulfilled His purpose he calls us home - what is there to be angry about. I kid you not, I spent at least 6 months going back and forth with this guy over the anger issue. Of all the shrinks in the world, I get stuck with the guy who insists that you HAVE to go through each and every stage of grief - and in order no less - before you can move on with your life.
He successfully brought me through most of the stages of grief, but in all our time together I would never say I was angry at my father or God - and I had yet to cry. I would not release the control. So, I learned relaxation exercises, I learned self hypnosis that to this day has messed up my ability to meditate (a very dear friend has given this ability back to me via an alternate process).
It wasn't until later in the year, while on a Theatre trip to see a play in San Antonio that I had breakthrough. We had gone to see On Golden Pond at a dinner theatre and on the way back to Corpus I suddenly broke down and completely lost it. Again, Mr. Mangrum was there for me. He sat with me while I cried for almost the whole 2 hour journey. It was then that I realised what I had been feeling all those long months and it wasn't my shrink who helped me figure it out - it was the great - and I mean great google him if you don't believe me - actor Pat O'Brian and his wife. They played the principle parts in the play. I remembered that my father had been ill shortly before he died - and I blamed myself. It was guilt I had been feeling. My father worked so hard to give us all a good life, and he was a student at the local college carrying a 4.0 average. Well, I used to usher at the theatre in Corpus and my junior year they put on a production of On Golden Pond. I was, of course, ushering, but that meant my mother had to keep the car (we only had one) so she could get me to and from the theatre and then we would pick my father up from school after the play ended. When we finally got to pick Dad up, the classes were finished and the school was locked up and there was Dad standing in the rain waiting for us. He got ill the next week and it was shortly after he recovered that he passed away.
All this time I had been blaming myself and it was the play that finally brought it out. To this day, I have not felt angry at the death of my father and I have since learned through other therapies and my training as a Stephen Minister that the stages of grief are not set in stone. Not everyone goes through them in the same order, and some skip stages, nor is there a set time for the grieving process to begin and end. I like to think of the grieving process in the same way the Amish view forgiveness. One day you grieve and feel better, but then another day you may have to grieve again. It is an ongoing process individual to each and every one of us. It is our own personal window that we have to step through on our own terms. My hope and prayer is that if you are grieving, you have someone by your side to help you through it.
Beautiful Bloggable Me
