Wheelbarrow

My take on grief is like this.  When you find out your child has died you pick up a wheelbarrow holding a pile of small rocks.  At first this is so overwhelming because you realize you have to push this wheelbarrow for the rest of your life.  Then day by day for the first month or so the wheelbarrow gets lighter and lighter because you get used to it.  And then you start to think that 'this isnt so bad, I can do this for the rest of my life.'  Little do you know that you have just been carrying your shock around because in the span of a short time your grief dumps an almost immovable pile of baseball sized stones in your wheelbarrow.  Every bit of your body strains against this load and you start to realize how incredibly difficult this is going to be.  A little bit each day if you work at your grief you take one or two rocks off your pile, some days you put some back on.  If you stop grieving you set your wheelbarrow down but it will be waiting for you to pick it back up, there is no walking away from it. Some day years from now your wheelbarrow will be empty, you have wiped it clean of even rock dust accumulated from years of hauling these rocks around.  You have reached a sort of peace with grief, but even then you still have to push the empty wheelbarrow around for the rest of your life.

Right now the wheelbarrow is chock full of rocks and sometimes it feels like people are throwing them at me just in spite.