Bargaining is Real

I get it

I never understood the bargaining stage of grief until now. I didn’t understand what there was to bargain for. If someone dies, they’re gone. That’s it. What can we bargain for?

Now I find myself, sometimes without even realizing it, running through every scenario that I think could have been a game-changer for my wife. I think about the argument we had just before she left about whether or not she should go and think to myself “maybe I could have said something differently to make her stay.” I think about the hospital days and decisions that were made each day and think “if I could have just pushed a little harder, maybe we could have gotten her [xyz] sooner.” I think about the night she died and think “I should have called the nurses in as soon as I saw she had taken the covers off herself.”

In all of these things, my brain begins to plead with G-d to transport me back in time so I can fix one or all of these “mistakes.”

And I get it now. The bargaining stage, at least for me, is asking the Almighty King of the Universe to send me into the past to try this whole thing again with the knowledge I now have.

I want to try again.

When I realized that, I tried to stop myself. But now I’m realizing that bargaining, like all of the other stages of grief, are a necessary part. I have to walk through it. And just like all the other stages (except the last one), it’s important to not get stuck. Spending my life stuck in the bargaining stage is like all of those time travel movies where the protagonist seeks to go back and stop a tragic event from happening in their life. What they usually find is that they cannot stop it, or they can, but it sets off so many other tragic events, they wind up having to change it back. The last Flash movie was exactly that. He could not stop the world from ending, no matter how many times he went back to change it. It was, as many in the comic world call “a canon event" or “a fixed point in time.” It was something that is destined to happen, no matter what, and is crucial to the time stream,

I wouldn’t go so far as to say my wife’s death was a fixed point in time. In fact, I know that she died before her time. I talk about it a little, very little bit in one of my past articles. She was not meant to go now, and no one can convince me otherwise. Though she was not supposed to, I know that she had to. That much I can admit and somewhat accept.

In running through past scenarios in my brain, I remember things that actually help me. I look back to text messages and voice notes that give me some sort of comfort. Then I cry because another piece of me accepts that she’s gone. So even though bargaining comes with the risk of getting me stuck, it is still a necessary step to healing.

I wouldn’t really call what I’m going through the “stages” of grief. It’s more like… well… grief. Like, the atmosphere of grief or the climate of grief or something like that. All of the “stages” are present and occupy the same space more or less. It’s been one month, and parts of me still can’t believe it. I’m also angry. Whenever I go to sleep, I hope to wake up in the past with her so I can try and prevent it. I am generally depressed. And in all of this, I’m slowly accepting the entire reality. She’s gone, and apart from conversations in my dreams, or little moments in nature and whatnot, I won’t really see her again until I go to join her.

But inside, parts of me are still looking up to the sky and saying “ok, here’s the deal...”