Beautiful Thunder: A Journey Through Grief

By Jenny Murison

“How would you feel if I asked you to say goodbye?”

This is the question that 27-year-old Jenny faces from her therapist nearly ten years after the love of her life died in a car crash. A book about healing and courage, Beautiful Thunder is a memoir of a young girl’s way forward through dark storms of u

• Language: English
• Publisher: Jennifer Murison
• Release date: Apr 15, 2020
• ISBN: 9780578664712

Jenny Murison

Jenny Murison is a native of the Pacific Northwest. She holds a graduate degree in social work and has dedicated her career to hospice work, eldercare issues, and grief counseling. She enjoys being a mother to her two children and wife to her husband Max.

Book preview

Chapter 1

The Storm Before the Calm

"H ow would you feel if I asked you to say goodbye?"

Tears leapt from my eyes. The floodgates had officially opened. Damn. I thought I was past this. Done with it. That I was healed. But, what does it really mean to heal? That the pain ends? That sorrow has packed its bags for good?

But the healing that I had convinced myself was done had only just begun.

Ten years after Tyler died, I still found myself lost in my thoughts and very much a prisoner in my head. Every day I came home from work and turned to food to fill a void inside of me. At five o’clock, I would arrive home from the store or perhaps multiple stops at fast-food drive-through places, my hands and bags filled with bundles of hot grease and sugar. Often I would not even make it home before I began tearing through the food to fill my starving heart.

Once I entered my home—a place where I yearned for solace—I would unwrap and ravage the fragrant paper bags, stuffing every morsel into my gaping, ravenous mouth and swallowing frantically. As thousands of calories slid down my throat into my gut, I felt the sugars and starches work their magic, filling an empty and aching hole within myself. I ate and ate until I could hold no more and at last I had entered a place of complete and utter disgust and numbness combined.

I found that each day after completing this ritual, my misery felt different. It was covered with chips, chocolate, pizza, hamburgers, and milkshakes. My hurt was hidden by a new misery that covered the old, disguising itself as something better and perhaps just slightly more tolerable. I could now be angry, sad, and disappointed with myself. I could accept this because it was my doing, my form of control. I had a reason to feel this way.

My relationship with food drastically changed after Tyler died. After multiple visits to doctors, therapists, and psychiatrists, I was diagnosed with binge eating disorder at the age of 22. At that time, I could not understand that what I was experiencing was so much more than physical hunger. As hard as I tried, I could not stop the starvation inside.

Now, at the age of twenty-seven, I found myself sitting on a worn-out vintage couch in front of a new therapist once again. Not because I was crazy, although I could not help but feel this way after all my failed attempts to soothe my wounded soul. No, I knew that this time I could not handle this feat on my own. I needed help. I needed someone from the outside to gently lead me back into myself. And now came the question I will never forget…

How would you feel if I asked you to say goodbye?

What the hell?? Why did I feel like my heart had just once again been torn from my chest, its arteries and veins left hanging, raw, pumping, gushing my life’s blood onto a hard, unforgiving floor? I couldn’t breathe. I thought I had been saying goodbye for all those years and doing my dutiful job of walking away, of leaving my past behind. In a split second, I realized I had deceived myself and everyone else in my life. Deep down inside, I knew that this was the reason I was here, on this couch, tissue in hand—to finally say goodbye.

I just hadn’t known how.

And how do you say goodbye to a future you had planned on spending with the love of your life? How do you let go of all those hopes and dreams of happiness and move on when all you yearn for is to go back in time to a safer, reliable, and innocent life? When you are young and experience a traumatic loss, one of the more difficult realities is that in the perception of others, it doesn’t hold as much impact. It is as though, because you are young, you should be able to more easily bounce back because you have your entire long future ahead of you.

But the truth is that getting introduced to the harsh reality and permanence of death in your younger years sets the stage for an altercation between identity development and crisis. It jolts you violently away from the tender ignorance of your youth. Because your brain is still physiologically developing, you simply do not have the same coping tool belt that you might have by the time you are an adult. The mere fact that our brains are not fully developed until our mid-twenties means that we can be left profoundly desolate in a space saturated with both low inhibitions and all-time emotional and hormonal highs.

Finding yourself in such a vulnerable phase of life and still not knowing who you are while struggling to form a self-identity can prove to be a train wreck. Being left to pick up the pieces in such a fragile state is terrifying because you must fight against the unknown grain to find out who you are amidst the loss of who you thought you were becoming. If you are not careful, you can spend the rest of your life living in that primal part of your brain, experiencing everything through a lasting lens of fear and heartbreak.

As my fingers stroked the sofa’s floral pattern, I could feel the individual bumps in its fabric and I found myself trying to stay grounded in this room with four walls. My mind continued to levitate toward the preoccupations that had left my heart isolated and confused. Strangely, I feared that I would forget everything about him—forget our secrets, the laughter that we had shared, the love that had exploded between two passionate souls. I was afraid of losing my connection to him, to our precious love.

I had no idea how much I was still holding on to my old dreams and hopes, no awareness of my relationship with my inner struggle. I can’t do it, I told my therapist through gasps and sobs and streams of tears rolling down my face, revealing emotions I had been disguising from myself for years.

After nearly ten years since my introduction to grief, I learned that saying goodbye doesn’t mean never thinking about that person again. It is not about forgetting. It is not about dying inside. It is about saying goodbye to the hopes, dreams, and plans that you had made. It means finally letting go of that old life, accepting the reality that that person is never coming back and making your own kind of peace with it.

It also means letting hope nestle in.

Perhaps I should have realized all of this much sooner than ten years, but when grief clenches you in its iron grasp, this reality is pretty tough to comprehend, let alone accept. The thought of saying goodbye, of finally letting go, was the scariest and most devastating journey I could ever fathom.

But, I needed to do this for my happiness, for my relationship with my soon-to-be husband Max, and most importantly for my heart to continue its healing. Gritting my teeth and wiping my tears away, I told myself, You wouldn’t be on this couch in the first place if this weren’t what you wanted. Finally, I was granting myself permission to move forward in my life.

I had not been aware of this before, but I had been stagnant and mired in massive guilt. I had always heard about survivor’s guilt, the guilt of moving on. It just never occurred to me that this was part of my struggle. It was not that I was better than guilt by any means, but I had always told myself only superficially that it was okay to move on, that Tyler would want me to live a life filled with happiness and love. I convinced myself of all sorts of things on the outside, but these thoughts never fully seeded my soul where they needed be watered so they could flourish into a new reality.

The paradox is that it is effortless to rationally speak to oneself, but it is far more challenging to connect with these rationalizations emotionally. Somehow, I had completely detached from my guilt and fooled myself into thinking that I had none. I had spent years convincing myself that I truly believed that I deserved happiness, only to discover that I had filled my life with self-sabotage.

If you have ever found your days so paralyzing that you could not decipher one from another, then you know how it feels to flail in the sea of grief. You battle so hard all day, only to sink defeated when the sun goes down. All you can do is lay your exhausted little head on your pillow and surrender. Then you wake up the next morning to repeat it all again.

Then one day, the tiniest, most meek voice inside of you starts whispering. This voice gets bolder, then louder until it seeps and booms into every crevice of your being. Whether you self-medicate with food, drugs, or alcohol, or jump into the arms of the nearest stranger, your existence becomes a quest to deny and quiet this voice. No matter how hard you fight or what you do, nothing calms the storm inside. At last you have no choice but to give in to grief’s hurricane winds of sorrow, its relentless rain drenching your face with no shelter or protection. That is when you know you must act.

We have often heard the phrase the calm before the storm. In grief, however, it is not the calm before the storm. It is during the storm before your calm when you finally decide to meet yourself face-to-face and begin putting up a fight for your very soul and life. Grief is not gentle; it rages like thunder. It howls in our hearts and dumps hail on our minds.

In my darkest days, my emotional and physical exhaustion crumpled me. I remained stuck in depression with no end in sight. Every day my chest and breath felt as though they were on fire, burning with anxiety and despair. My emotions were a mix of black and red, my mind dull like fading paint that had sat in the harsh sun for too long. I became afraid of the night, because it was then that I would cry myself to sleep as unfiltered thoughts rushed in without permission or pardon. I was a misplaced, displaced soul with no hope for a better