Tomorrow is the Qingming Festival, a day to pursue the distant future cautiously. At a time when the epidemic is deep, there must be many people who cannot return to their hometowns to pay tribute to their deceased relatives, and can only send mourning from afar.
A year ago, the husband of the northern girl Xiao Jiang died unexpectedly. The great grief came like a storm, and she experienced post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). After passing through the "unbelievable" stage, Xiao Jiang began to walk, read, swim, and seek help from a psychiatrist. Accompanied by her family, she tried to make psychological recovery.
It's the story of how ordinary people fight, dissolve bereavement, and try to live with it. Here's what Jiang said:
confusion
On the afternoon of March 21, a 132-passenger china Eastern Airlines plane crashed in TengXian County, Wuzhou, Guangxi Province. When I saw the news, I was heartbroken, and at about this time a year ago, I also accidentally lost my husband. That night, I couldn't sleep all night.
A year ago in the spring, a sunny and somewhat harsh morning. Shortly after I arrived at work, I received a call from my husband's colleague. The phone said very vaguely: "Xiao so-and-so is injured, we are in so-and-so hospital at this time."
After hanging up the phone, I rushed to the hospital. On the way, I did not have an ominous premonition, thinking that my husband was stumbling and had suffered some skin trauma. Or the wound is deeper, a few stitches are good, and then the more serious may be a fracture.
When I arrived at the hospital, my husband was already in the emergency department. His parents also arrived, but the family would not let them in and had to wait outside. I saw a lot of people out there, his relatives, colleagues, and classmates who were on good terms.
I asked the person who called me, "Where did it hurt?" He pointed to the position of his back. Shaw was injured at work, injured an artery, and had a lot of blood.
Everyone comforted me and said that there would be no big problem. But I fidgeted, and from time to time I got up to look at the door of the rescue room, but I couldn't see anything.
The news came out that the person was unconscious, but had vital signs and had been transfused with blood. Due to the lack of medical common sense, I didn't know what that meant, but I felt like the whole person was very confused.
At 11 a.m., the doctor came out of the rescue room and shouted "Xiao Mou's family." I and his parents went up. The doctor said, "I'll tell you, people can't do it."
A cold sentence caught me off guard and couldn't find the right words to describe my feelings.
My legs were weak and I almost fell to my knees, remembering that several people around me carried me to my seat.
"Impossible, impossible." I muttered in my mouth.
We begged the doctor to rescue him for a while and use the best medicine. When the door to the rescue room opened again, I rushed in. On more than a dozen hospital beds, there lay all kinds of patients, and my husband lay on the innermost bed, bloodless. The nurse was doing electrical defibrillation on him while blood was transfusing on the other side.
I took his hand, trying to get him to feel my temperature, calling his name loudly, and kept talking to him. I kissed the back of his hand lightly, hoping for a "medical miracle."
However, everything is in vain.
Later, I can only remember two fragments -- the patient's family sitting next to me whispered to me, "If you want to cry, cry." Shaw's mother sat on my left and said, "I'll never see him again." I subconsciously covered my ears.
The moment I left the hospital, I screamed in the air. It was a wail, as if it were a cry of sorrow.
dreamland
On the night my husband died, I didn't dare to close my eyes and go to sleep. The spring thunder was rolling outside, as if the heavens were also mourning for him.
At first, I couldn't believe he was gone.
He is in his early thirties, a tall man of about one meter and eighty, with a large body, loves to play basketball, loves to play games, and is always full of vitality on weekdays. Almost everyone who knew him rated him as "sunny, optimistic, and upright."
Xiao Jiang kept a photo of her husband before his death.
Image source: Courtesy of the interviewee
The husband is a simple and frugal man. A week before the accident, he had just given himself an eyeglass, which was because the lenses of the previous glasses were badly worn, otherwise, he would not be willing to change them.
Due to the nature of his work, he often runs outdoors. The places I go are often wilderness ridges or mountains, and every time I go home, my shoes and pants are covered with mud. Therefore, his body has always been healthy, and he rarely even goes to the hospital.
I couldn't believe that such a living person had left me. It always felt like news, a novel, a movie, or a nightmare.
As soon as the thought that he has left this world came up, I would collapse into tears, shake my head vigorously, and even slap myself on the head.
During that time, I was afraid of the dark, and I had to sleep with the lamp on. Until now, I still can't sleep back to the state I was in before the incident, sometimes it is difficult to fall asleep, sometimes I wake up in the middle of the night, and I can't sleep for the next few hours.
I began to cry at any time and place, anytime, anywhere. The tears dried up on his face over and over again, leaving a trail of tears. I never imagined that people would shed so many tears that they couldn't stop.
Every day when I wake up, my first reaction is that my world is different, and everything he has experienced has become a phantom. The sun was shining outside the window, but the thought of my lover in another cold world made me lie numbly on the bed, motionless.
I remember when we were together, he once pinched himself and said, "Is this true?" It's like a dream." In the end, he also walked out of my life in a dream-like way, making this dream short, sweet and sad.
In the early hours of the day of May 7, I dreamed of him again.
In the dream, we sat on two sofas in the house, he sat and I lay. I kept crying, and he sat down on my side, pulled me up, and hugged me.
In the dream, he wore a blue T-shirt with a lightning bolt pattern on it. I hugged him tightly, crying and complaining that he couldn't make such jokes, saying, "You know what? This month I dreamed that you were gone."
This was the first time I had a clear dream of him since his death—handsome features, solid arms, and broad chest. Dreams are as clear as reality. When I woke up, I thought maybe he had come to say goodbye to me.
The hospital where he died and his unit were on the west side of the city. I haven't been to the west of the city since.
Sights
After I got out of the hospital, I went back to my parents' house to stay with them, and didn't come back to my husband and me until a month later.
The home is still the same arrangement as before the accident. His computer and headphones were still lit, flashing and flashing. On the washstand, there was the eye cream and men's mask that he had shelved, which others had bought before the wedding and said that they wanted to take care of themselves.
On the bedside table, there was a handwritten card that Tanabata had given me flowers, and it read, "To the favorite XX (my nickname), you are my lobster."
Flowers given to her by Xiao Jiang's husband before she died.
On the chest of drawer, there was me and his water cup, and next to it there was half an irregular piece of aluminum foil. During that time, I got up early every morning to take medicine on an empty stomach, and he poured water for me. When I was halfway through the medicine, I cut off half of the empty aluminum foil, and he saw it, cut it into an arc, and said, "Otherwise it's too sharp, it's easy to scratch."
We used to sit in the living room watching TV, and he would occasionally use his fingers on my arm or the back of his hand to write down I and YOU and draw a heart pattern.
All of this is vividly remembered, and it is like a lifetime away. I lay on the side of the bed where he used to sleep, holding his pillow and crying for a long time, trying to find his smell.
Every day, I would send him WeChat, think of everything and tell him, and have been sending it for three or four months. But the messages that pop up on WeChat will never be sent by him again, and he will no longer call me - when a person who accompanies him day and night disappears from daily life, how developed contemporary technology and communication are, and how cruel it is.
The streets and alleys of our city also leave us with many memories. Seeing things and thinking about people is a painful thing.
The first time we met was on an early winter night. He waited for me downstairs at my house, got in the car, and asked me what I wanted to eat. I had mouth ulcers two days and said don't eat too spicy, so he took me to a Huaiyang restaurant. At dinner he asked me what I liked, and I said photography. When he sent me home, he invited me to go to the ginkgo auction the next day.
I remember going to that restaurant again to commemorate the sixth anniversary of our acquaintance, and it was still open. But after he died, I once passed by the restaurant and found that it was closed.
Neither of us ever photographed Ginkgo biloba. It's not that there is no chance, but I always think that japan is long.
A vow card written by Xiao Jiang's husband before the wedding.
fact
My grandmother is almost 90 years old, her eyes are glazed, her hearing is poor, and the first time I went back to my grandmother's house for a long time after the incident, she saw me, and the first thing she said was "Why didn't he come back together?" Fortunately, her eyes were not good, and she did not see that I was already in tears.
Later, every time I went back, my grandmother asked him, and I used reasons such as "overtime" and "business trip" to prevaricate. Once, when she was celebrating her birthday and the whole family was having dinner together, I raised a glass to wish her a long life, but she took my hand and said, "You have to take care." I think she probably already knew what was going on.
Everyday drops hurt the most. Not long after resting at home, I went to work normally.
Before going to work, I was under a lot of psychological pressure, afraid to go out, afraid to see people, afraid to go to work, afraid to sit at my desk. I became more and more timid, feeling that the outside world was frightening and disturbing. Because the last time I was here, everything was fine, and I could still talk and laugh with others, and now it's a different situation.
For the first three or four months of my husband's death, I cried once a day. When I go to work, I often sit at my desk and cry. Our office conditions were poor, one person next to another, no blocking, I could only cry silently.
For more than half a year, my eyes were swollen and I had lost my energy. I stopped taking pictures and my sideburns added gray hair.
The ordinary details of life of others will make me envious. Because I feel that I have been deprived of the right to live a normal life.
I used to like Friday afternoons best. In the past, he and I always went to eat delicious food after work on Fridays, and sometimes even deliberately ran a little farther, which made it feel more like a weekend. But I know that it will never happen again.
Source: Station Cool Helo
To distract me, I started forcing myself to read.
During that time, I read a lot of books that discussed life and death, and each one had a strong sense of integration. I also read other books and immersed myself completely in the plot of the book and didn't think about my own affairs. I read all kinds of books, but I don't read emotional books.
I remember reading a book about Iceland, and I thought that before the outbreak of the epidemic, one of the honeymoon places we planned was Iceland, and I did a lot of raiders and looked at a lot of photos. So reading the Icelandic things described in the book, I suddenly cried.
To dispel my grief, I enjoyed swimming and walking.
When swimming, every time I bury my head in the water, I try to prolong the time under the water as long as possible, so that the whole person is wrapped in the water in the pool, as if this can produce a feeling of "isolation from the world". I like to go out for a walk alone, as if walking can walk out of this thing.
The days go by. Later, his image began to blur, even if the photos and videos were in the phone, it seemed like a person from the previous life. Even myself before the accident was a little strange to me.
Finally, I accepted the fact that he was dead and no longer fantasized that he was still somewhere in the world. Maybe that's the way the yin and yang are? The feeling is so far away, so far away that no matter what you do, you feel powerless, and you can't even miss it.
Half a year later, when I heard that his grandfather was gone, my first reaction was: on the side of parallel time and space, there was one more relative who could accompany him. He wouldn't be so lonely anymore.
recover
Spring is here. The leaves swayed in the sun, but even if I basked in the sun and saw a hundred flowers blooming, I couldn't be happy.
Although I had accepted the fact that my husband had left, the pain was still sharp and tormented me.
In my mind, scenes in the hospital often come to mind uncontrollably. As soon as I watched TV and saw the bleeding, I was extremely painful.
My memory is also much worse than before, often throwing around, taking the car home and getting off the train ahead of the train. I was not interested in anything, and felt that everything was meaningless, as if I could not even laugh. People are always in a state of tension and cannot relax.
I also became irritable and irritable. When you hear topics and words related to him that can be associated, you will be nervous, even unable to breathe, and want to escape from that environment immediately.
In this situation, I cut off all contact with him and disconnected from my original circle of friends. Especially mutual friends who have a good relationship do not know how to face it.
I learned later that I was sick. These symptoms are difficult to describe and cannot be quantified. So, after eight months of struggling, I plucked up the courage to seek help from a doctor. On the eve of the 2021 National Day holiday, I came to Beijing to receive treatment from a doctor at a psychological rescue agency.
This is my first psychological counseling, and I feel a little nervous. The doctor is a well-known psychological rescue and crisis intervention expert in China, sitting in front of him, I found that he has a very kind attitude. He was very patient in chatting with me, asking me questions and keeping a detailed record of my situation. Eventually, he gave the diagnosis that I had post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD).
But the doctor said that because my previous life experience and my original family were very healthy, there was no other more complicated content, which was beneficial for later treatment and recovery.
It was also through this opportunity that I discovered that counseling was not exactly what I had imagined. It is not a headache to heal the head and a foot to heal the foot, but to ask the cause and effect of the matter, ask me about my growth experience and the original family situation.
The one-hour consultation ended quickly. Finally, the doctor gave me two pieces of advice, "Walk and keep a journal."
Xiao Jiang's medical records.
In addition to the doctors, my family members are helping me as well.
My parents were getting older, and they were supposed to enjoy the joy of the world, but because of what happened to me, they suffered together. This year, my mother was worried about me and gave birth to a lot of gray hair.
I remember that on the eve of The National Day last year, on the way to Beijing, the high-speed train sped by, and the scenery outside the window was still there, but I couldn't be happy. In the evening rush hour, Beijing West Railway Station was particularly congested, but my cousin who lived in Beijing insisted on picking me up at the station. Throughout the National Day holiday, my uncle also thought about me everywhere and asked me "what I want to eat and where I want to go to play."
I know that for me, the grief of losing my husband can only be chewed and digested alone, and the advice that others can give is very limited. More often, the family is accompanying and listening, but it is also a kind of help, and it is precious.
When will I recover completely? I do not know. In the future, I will need several more psychological interventions.
Looking back on these days, I feel that the sooner the closest relative died unexpectedly, the better the psychological intervention. Although everyone will react differently to this situation, they will definitely feel sad. If you deliberately suppress sadness and pretend to be indifferent, it is easy to cause bigger problems.
I know that for some time to come, I will be miserable and depressed, but I try to see this as a low point in my life. Although after a few years, this matter will definitely be an indelible scar in my heart.
But I knew I could recover. There will be a day.
(In order to protect the privacy of the parties, Xiao Jiang is a pseudonym in the text.) ）
Author: Xiao Jiang
Producer: Pan Wenbo
First image source: Stand Cool Helo