What happens when you hold back your tears?

I have been told my whole life that I am strong. Even if it means holding back the tears while watching my Mom slowly pass away from cancer at age 60, or watching my young children, 3 and 5 years old, cry because they are losing the best Nana they have ever known. The type of Nana who plays on the floor and builds lego with them, or kicks a soccer ball around in the backyard. Or how about when I had to keep my emotions and fears in check, so that I didn’t lose it in Emergency when my 11 month old daughter was admitted with a heart arrythmia which required several more procedures and trips to Emergency over the course of her childhood. And what about my strength when I found out that my youngest, sister, Robin, 46, had colon cancer? Robin was the baby sister I took care of, the one whom I spoke to on the phone or emailed every day. 

Sure I have strength. I can carry on thinking positive thoughts and squishing my pain and grief inside so I won’t have to deal with it. But it has a way of catching up and it happened this past year.

Many times I have said that my husband’s diagnosis of frontotemporal dementia, has been a ‘tipping’ point in my life. Toughing through my days, pretending that all is well, stopped working for me this past winter. It took 2 years of living with the reality of Dave’s dementia before my body and mind began breaking down. My final breaking point came shortly after a major event with the Alzheimer’s Society (same month I received a phone call from a woman whose husband died years ago from FTD). Our family was selected to be the 2009 honouree family for the Alzheimer’s Walk for Memories. I was thrilled because I wanted to share the insights and lessons our family is learning from this challenging journey. 

For 3 months leading up to the Walk, there were dozens of media events-radio interviews, television bits, newspaper articles and pictures, rotary and sponsorship meetings etc. I managed to hold it together for 98% of the time and for the remaining 2%, I was pretty quick to recover. But I didn’t realize that every time I was telling my story, I had to screw the lid on my emotions tighter and tighter. They were starting to leak through…I didn’t like feeling the pain.

By early February when the event was over, I woke up with a fever and a flu which lasted 7 weeks. For the first time in 21 years–since my Mom died– I missed work. For the first time I was actually sick enough to lie in bed for 5 days. I am lucky my illness wasn’t more serious. I am also lucky because I understood the lesson. If I don’t learn to surrender to Dave’s condition–to accept and give myself permission to cry over slowly losing the sweetest man I have ever known—then I was going to end up being one of the 80% of caregivers of dementia ,who don’t do very well. If I wanted to do my best for Dave, my kids and me, I needed to change what I was doing.

I started to understand that if I wanted joy to return to my life, I needed to make room for it. The only way to do this is by releasing all of the junk and stuff I have collected over the years. Fortunately, energy moves quickly and in my next post, I will share 2 of my favourite releasing techniques.