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    A Trek in the Desert: Finding a Path Through Grief
    A Trek in the Desert: Finding a Path Through Grief
    A Trek in the Desert: Finding a Path Through Grief
    Ebook128 pages1 hour

    A Trek in the Desert: Finding a Path Through Grief

    By Roberta Zybach Yarbrough

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    About this ebook

    A Trek In the Desert: Finding a Path Through Grief is a book about the universal experience of grief, and the road to grief recovery. In her burning need to find relief and regain a feeling of sanity following the death of her son by suicide, the death of her husband from cancer and the death of an ex-husband, Roberta Zybach Yarbrough began her personal journey to understand something about grief and grief recovery. In the process, she discovered that there remained unresolved issues surrounding the loss of her parents. In this book, she draws on her own observations, experience and the knowledge primarily gleaned through reading, counseling (both private and group) attending grief recovery seminars, and through her own writing.

    The reader is taken on a journey through the life of a divorced single mother, her struggles to become self-supporting, self-sufficient and self-confident enough to trust another relationship. Her second marriage, to Lee, also ends in divorce. As she continues to advance in her career, her self-confidence increases and she is willing to commit to another relationship. In 1976, she is again married. Her husband, Bob, is subsequently diagnosed with cancer.

    While her life to this point has not been easy, she is totally unprepared for the news of the death by suicide of her son, Todd, who was battling cocaine addiction. She feels her emotions must be stifled to a large extent because of the responsibility she carries of tending her terminally ill husband. For the two years between the death of her son and the death of her husband, she begins her grief work. She seeks relief from the guilt and anger as well as shame and rejection associated with suicide. At the same time, she is dealing with anger at her husband for being seriously ill and unable to offer her comfort or help with her grief work. She learns that irrational feelings are a part of grief.

    While she is working to recover from the loss of her son, she feels that she dare not give in to her grief as she faces the imminent death of her husband. As Bob enters hospice care, Roberta becomes his caregiver. In the last four months of his life, he requires constant care, giving the couple a special time together to iron out differences, forgive and be forgiven. She says, Caring for Bob in his last days was the most loving things I have ever had the opportunity to do.

    A few months after Bobs death, Lee also dies following a lingering illness. While their marriage was short, they had remained friends, and his death was another serious loss. Since she is an ex-wife who had remarried, she is a disenfranchised griever.

    Different emotions are associated with each of these losses. Death by suicide leaves survivors in shock, feeling rejection, anger, guilt and shame. In the case of death from cancer, there is a feeling of relief that suffering has ended, yet there is a deep sadness and a feeling of exhaustion.

    Disenfranchised grief is a sense of loss not normally recognized as legitimate grief by society. For instance, an ex-spouse, a distant relative, a pet, a homosexual partner, etc. The grief is real but unrecognized. These feelings, while often severe, are normally untended since they are ignored by society. Therefore, those who grieve often believe they, too, should ignore their feelings. Stuffing emotions under a mental rug does not make them go away.

    In her grief work, Yarbrough discovers that there are unresolved issues surrounding her parents deaths in the mid 1970. She has been unable to return to the home in Texas where she was raised and where her parents had lived until her mothers death in 1972. Everything is different. Her parents are gone, the house is gone. What had always been a safe harbor in the storms of her life is no more. &nb

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherXlibris US
    Release dateSep 22, 2000
    ISBN9781465323651
    A Trek in the Desert: Finding a Path Through Grief
    Author

    Roberta Zybach Yarbrough

    Born on a dry land farm in the Texas Panhandle during the Great Depression, Roberta Zybach Yarbrough learned early that life is hard. Married at age 17, she was divorced and left with three children to raise. After remarriage, she pursued her life-long interest in creative writing, taking courses from the University of Oklahoma and New Mexico State University. The death of her son and husband drove her to seek relief from the pain of loss. This book is the product of her experience with grief and grief recovery. Retired from her position as administrative secretary in the Department of Social Work at New Mexico State University, she lives in Las Cruces, New Mexico, where she volunteers in various area in her church and community. To date, approximately 80 of her works have appeared in various publications. She says, “Life’s been hard, but it’s been a blast.”

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      Book preview

      A Trek in the Desert - Roberta Zybach Yarbrough

      Copyright © 2000 by Roberta Zybach Yarbrough.

      All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any

      form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording,

      or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing

      from the copyright owner.

      This book was printed in the United States of America.

      To order additional copies of this book, contact:

      Xlibris Corporation

      1-888-7-XLIBRIS

      www.Xlibris.com

      Orders@Xlibris.com

      Contents

      FOREWORD

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      SECTION I

      CHAPTER ONE

      CHAPTER TWO

      CHAPTER THREE

      SECTION II

      CHAPTER FOUR

      CHAPTER FIVE

      CHAPTER SIX

      SECTION III

      CHAPTER SEVEN

      CHAPTER EIGHT

      SECTION IV

      CHAPTER NINE

      CHAPTER TEN

      AFTERWORD

      To Keith, Krystal Crissie, Travis and Reeanna

      who shared my loss,

      To Lottie,

      who walked with me each step of the way,

      To Margaret

      who guided me through my desert of despair,

      To Pamela Landon

      who unselfishly gave advice and encouragement,

      To these, with deepest gratitude

      this book is dedicated.

      FOREWORD

      I met Roberta on the day I started at our mutual place of work. We met quickly on a real level, person to person and woman to woman level, in regard to what she discusses with you in this wonderful book—the issues of grief, loss, the happenings and the feelings about them, and the ways in which you deal with them, and they with you. We had in common the loss of a son and the loss of parents, and I have learned from her about the loss of spouses. We have talked together about the issues of multiple losses. I have learned much from her and am glad to respond to her request of this small contribution to her book.

      Roberta has asked me to talk a bit about my near death experience, as I understand that this is what it is now called. This happened to me a long time ago—more than fifty-five years—long before this experience had been written about in the literature or in the delineations by Kubler-Ross and others. I thought for a long time that this was, perhaps, a dream. I am not sure to this day if it was or wasn’t. When I read the studies, I did think Oh, that’s what it was, but I surely do not know.

      I was, I believe, about ten or eleven years old. I was a daughter of a physician, and I initially had contracted a strep infection that was complicated in its middle by a severe case of measles. I had undergone a number of surgical procedures to correct incredibly painful infections in my neck. I had a number of days or weeks of dangerously high temperatures. I became emaciated and extremely thin for the only period of my life. This all happened in the days before penicillin, and I was violently allergic to the available sulfa derivatives which produced great purple and painful welts that could not tolerate even a sheet over my violently swollen legs. I had been severely ill for nearly four months, and this is what I remember of the night in question.

      With extremely high temperatures I was in and out of semi sleep, semi coma, and I believe I heard my physician father’s friend and colleague say, I’m sorry, Ed, I don’t think she’ll make it.

      A different experience happened right then. I was in a different place and space. I was being wafted in total comfort, with no pain, down a sky-blue, salmon warm, plastically smooth corridor to the accompaniment of music, Chopin I think, and was encased in warmth with a gentle breeze playing with my hair. Ahead of me I saw a wonderful azure blue and a golden somebody who held out arms to welcome me, and I never again, before, or since wanted to be anywhere more. I sat up and reached forward and felt strong and well for the first time in so many months, but at that moment a portcullis, (like those in fairy tales of dungeons) lowered slowly and inexorably in front of me, and a voice said, No it is not time. Go back. I remember feeling bereft and full of loss of what might have been. And I was mad as hell!

      I woke in my own bed, feeling furious, and flung a pitcher of ice water over the night nurse who called down to my parents, as she wiped herself off: Looks like she’s much better this morning. I wanted to throw another pitcher over her. I didn’t. She was the woman who came in every night and said, We must do everything to help, and nothing to hinder!

      I never told my parents of what I had experienced? My parents were not the kind of folks you talked to about strange occurrences. I did not know whether it had been simply a dream, but it didn’t feel like a dream. I do not know whether or not it was simply a dream. I don’t think so.

      I do know that before then I had recurrent bad dreams of dying. I have never had them since, and somehow I did not from that time forward, and do not now, fear dying. Somehow, it feels like a part of living.

      As a woman, I think that there are three major happenings in our lives. The first is our birth, which I, at least, cannot remember. The second is the birth of our child or children, which is etched forever in memory, and the third is, I think, our death, which we cannot know ahead of time. I think, maybe, I have been fortunate enough to have been given a preview. At least, that is how it feels so many years later. I have come to believe that dying is not the tough part; it may well be as beautiful as my experience/dream. It is being left behind that is the experience to be configured. That is what Roberta’s wise book is about. For there is wisdom here and a guide to getting through the valley we have both experienced, each in our different ways.

      Pamela L. Landon, Ph.D.

      PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

      There is no flock, however watched and tended But one dead lamb is there!

      There is no fireside, howsoe’er defended But has one vacant chair!

      Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Resignation)

      Nothing is certain but death and taxes. Those two certainties may be true for the one who paid taxes and died, but for the survivors, there is a third certainty: grief. Sooner or later, it comes to all of us. Where there is life, eventually there is death. Where there is death, there is grief.

      Usually, by the time we face grieving the loss of a loved one, we have experienced a variety of smaller losses and griefs. The longer I live, the more certain I am that life is a delicate mixture of births and deaths, happiness and sorrow. We can hardly know one without becoming intimate with the other. In our society, we tend to blunder through grief, trying to ignore it rather than dealing with it, simply because we have no idea of what else can be done. The feeling of grief is so like that of anger or fear that we sometimes fail to recognize the feeling as grief. We muddle through without a path to follow.

      Material dealing with grief and grief recovery is usually written by experts such as ministers, physicians, psychologists or social workers who counsel the bereaved. I am none of these. I write as a person who has experienced grief and, for the most part, has gone through the process of recovery. My purpose in writing this book is twofold. First, the process of writing about my grief experiences and the concepts I have learned continue to serve as an exercise in recovery rather than another walk through the dark days of grief. Second, as one who has been there, I have been able to grasp some of the concepts associated with grief recovery and wish to share them with those who are suffering the pangs of grief and think the pain will never end.

      Over the years, I have had ample opportunity to learn something of grief. Neighbors, relatives, grandparents, brother-in-law, and in season, both of my parents died. It was only when the full fury of grief threatened to drag me down that I gave attention to trying to understanding grief and the recovery process.

      Within less than a three-year span, three significant losses drove me to seek help in dealing with the unrelenting pain suffered due to these losses. The first loss was the death by suicide of my thirty-one-year-old son, Todd. Twenty-two months later, my husband, Bob, died after a valiant battle with cancer. Within the year, my ex-husband, Lee, who had remained a dear and trusted friend, died following a lingering illness. I was left to deal with three vastly different types of loss. In the process, I found that after twenty years, there were still issues surrounding my parents’ deaths that had been left unexplored and unresolved.

      It was necessary to do more than merely cope from day

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