There’s a consistent message or saying in the “grief world” that the second year is harder than the first. People don’t give too much explanation, they just go around intoning this. Although I haven’t generally found this to be true, last night I was crying a little bit thinking I can no longer look back and check mentally on what Sarah was doing at this time last year. What she wore for the first day of school. Whether she went trick or treating. She was simply dead at this time last year. And it will always be that way. So maybe that’s why the second year is harder than the first.
When I was a kid, I used to listen obsessively to my parents’ Beatles records, especially Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and Rubber Soul. I sang all the songs and knew the lyrics and dissected them. There was a song “She’s Leaving Home” from Sgt. Pepper. It was a song that scared me and troubled me. A young girl seems to just disappear from her home and her parents forever. The mother says “Daddy, our baby’s gone” during the song. Did the girl leave voluntarily? Was she kidnapped? She simply disappeared. Later I found out Paul McCartney based it on a real-life case in Britain of a teen disappearing, Melanie Coe, who ran off with her boyfriend and was missing for 10 days. This song started playing in my head as I was crying and thinking about Sarah and the potential difficult second year of mourning.
For some reason my thoughts run to a funny but sad story my Dad told Max and me the other day, about his friend Rich who has a dachshund, Stella. Stella was taken to be spayed but the operation had to be put off because apparently Stella is suffering from a false pregnancy. This is a known medical phenomenon in female dogs where their bodies react as if they are pregnant but there are no pups. It’s just hormones, I guess. We laughed and joked about a baby shower for her, but inside I felt a little bit sad. I guess this is probably just a physical syndrome for dogs, but I imagined poor Stella wanting puppies so badly that her body produced this false pregnancy, and I felt sorry for her. It’s no fun to be so obviously longing for a child.
The First Year Without Sarah 