The Day After Affect

What is the day-after effect, you ask? It is an eerie life-moved-on-without-my-permission kind of moment that happens after an event blindsides my heart. A time when I wake up the next morning and everything is the same...but everything is different. Life keeps on going, the world keeps turning, yet life is changed forever.

And I can't do a blasted thing about it.

On those days, and often for quite some time afterward, I'm very uncomfortable in my now-altered state of existence. I want to stomp my foot, roll back the clock, or at the very least pretend that nothing happened.

Betcha know how well that works, huh?

Looking back, it surprises me how long it took me to experience...or maybe recognize is a better phrase...the day-after effect. As I pen this, it's given me brain cramps to figure out why. The only answer I can come up with is that I was so wrapped up in my own life that I never realized just how much (and how fast) things can change, yet everything else is still the same.

The first time I remember having an inkling that some events change the lives of all those around them was the day after Albert's youngest sister got married. Yikes...that was in 1986...and I was 27 years old.

At the time I was a wife and mother immured in the duties and challenges that go with having little children. I was also fairly oblivious to the fact that I wasn't an island unto myself; I still worked under the impression that my life was no body's business but mine.

Then, the day after Shelly got married, my in-laws invited us for lunch after church.

When we got there, it was obvious that something had changed, something I couldn't put my finger on. Same house, same people...well, except for Shelly, who was on her honeymoon. We were even eating leftovers from the reception the night before. Everything seemed to be the same...yet everything was different.

It was weird.

During the next several years I vaguely noticed the day-after effect a few more times, especially after the deaths of both my grandmothers who passed away two months and seven days apart. But I still didn't figure out what was happening.

Then, in 1998, Albert's youngest brother died tragically and unexpectedly. I'd lost my job the Friday before and suddenly I wanted to tell the world to stop and let me off.

Carl was only 31...too young to die...and I didn't have a job to go back to that would give me those daily hours away from the grief. Suddenly the world seemed to be a hostile place...I remember the exact spot I was in when I realized that even as much as we hurt cars kept driving by, the grass still grew, the sun rose each morning and set at night. We lived in the same house, woke up every morning to the same old routine, but the whole family was hurting beyond anything I had ever experienced before. Our lives had changed forever, and I found myself very angry that the world acted as if nothing had happened.

It just didn't seem fair.

But, it is with a strange hesitancy that I share that I'm glad that life kept moving until, eventually, we became used to the new order. It was a slow process but each day the clock turned until one morning the pain finally began to lessen.

I've experienced the day-after effect a few more times in the years since, sometimes when bad things happen, sometimes after long awaited, joyful happenings. The day-after effect doesn't seem to discriminate between pleasant and unpleasant.

The latest, and the reason I've spent almost a whole week writing this, happened the morning after our second son graduated from High School. I don't know why I was taken by surprise, after all, our oldest graduated four years earlier. I'd done all this before. Add the facts that Adam had finished his school work three weeks earlier, was working full time, and already enrolled in college. But I guess the dizzying pace I kept for those weeks shielded me from the full brunt of reality.

Or maybe I just wanted it to.

The morning after the ceremony and accompanying party I realized with a gut wrenching certainty that the hoopla was over. My little dimpled doll, my baby boy was officially a man. There was no more busy-ness to shield my heart from the crushing magnitude of my son's coming of age. Combine that with the fact that his ceremony fell on his eighteenth birthday and I woke up feeling empty. Something had changed forever, it was beyond my control, yet Adam was asleep in his room. He even plans to live at home during his first two years of college. That morning we all got up, went to church, came home and ate leftovers from the party the night before...

...everything was the same, yet it was very different.

Sometimes it is a tragic event that causes the day-after effect. Sometimes it is the passing of a much anticipated holiday, or the day-after a shout-to-the-world-moment. Either way, those profound alterations of reality are sometimes followed by a sense of loss, of grieving and mourning, along with the sadness, emptiness, and loneliness that change can bring about.

On those mornings I wake up with the knowledge that my existence has changed again without my permission. But gratefully experience has taught me that the same unyielding passage of time I so resent will eventually help me get used to each alteration, each challenge. It will also help me hang onto the joy in living even through the pain because, as long as the sun rises and sets in my life, I can choose, no matter how long it takes, to rejoice in each new situation even though sometimes I deeply miss what used to be.

That's as it should be.

Jackie

Copyright 2004 by Jackie Zimmerer