Happy 3 Months Lucy - Friday March 22nd, 2023

Refusing to "get over" you, more on grief and loss and a little Joe Cocker

Mar 22, 2024

Lucy Pieper Zibrowski arrived three months ago into this world this past Wednesday the 20th of March. It is truly hard to fathom all that we have been through in such a short time period and how much this little bunny has altered our lives for the better. In her short time on earth she showed us how to be strong, how it was alright to feel weak and of course how to fight with everything in your soul.

Lucy’s impact on me, and on others, continues on well beyond her time here on earth. I had a conversation with a follower of Chapter 3 Stigma this week about grief. We discussed our own personal encounters with grief over the last few months and we discussed something that I think is vital when it comes to grief and loss.

There’s a tendency in our American culture to think that we should be able to work through and “get over” any situation where we encounter grief or loss. I find that intensely unhealthy. Alyssa and I declared shortly after the loss of Lucy that we never want to “get over” the loss, but we agreed that we needed to figure out how to live with the loss of her. This mindset change has been incredibly helpful when it comes to allowing us to step back into the regular aspects of our life and establish our new normal.

Every milestone we have hit since the loss of Lucy from making the move back to Boise to something as simple as sending Grant back to daycare, Alyssa and I take a moment to address the fact that this is another step in our journey of learning how to live without Lucy in our lives. It allows us to be forgiving of ourselves when emotions run high or we get slammed with an unexpected wave of sorrow or grief.

This mindset has prevented us from sitting around in our misery waiting for things to feel “right”. We held our daughter in her dying moments of life on this earth, nothing is going to feel like it did for us before that moment ever again! I don’t think a morning has gone by yet where I’m torn to stay in bed when my alarm goes off, but for me that wouldn’t help me learn to live with my loss so I get up and get going with my day.

Another benefit of this mindset for us is that we feel we can say that we’ll never get over the loss of our girl, and that’s not a crippling position to be in. I never want to forget Lucy, I never want to get over her. She’s my little girl forever and I’m honored to be her father.

These waves of grief hit at random times. Something just occurred as I typed that last paragraph out, despite how short, poorly structured and innocuous it is. Yesterday I was out on a walk with Grant and the dog, pushing Grant in the stroller. I had this moment where I thought about where we could have been at this time had Lucy been healthy. These thought processes aren’t necessarily the healthiest to dwell on, but it’s nearly impossible to prevent your thoughts from going there for a short time.

So I let the thought play out, wondering if I would have had Grant biking along side us (he’s like his mother and kind of hates biking) or if we would have gone with the double stroller set up. I laughed to myself about how fun that would be to manage and store. Anyway, I could feel sorrow build up in me some while going through this thought process so I kind of moved on with the walk and with my thoughts.

For whatever reason when I was typing that previous paragraph out I could feel that repressed sorrow come back and I cried for a while. The combination of yesterday’s wandering of the mind and then specifically writing about Lucy overwhelmed me for a few minutes. This is what happens. It’s starting to subside, but it still hits pretty strongly now and again.

We have come to a point where we can talk openly about Lucy and her story with others without being overwhelmed with emotion. There are aspects of her story that I have only shared a couple times that are my experiences and perspectives from her life that still really hit me hard emotionally. I’m not overly guarded about sharing them, it’s just that the person or people on the receiving end need to be prepared.

Every single night before bed Grant asks whoever is putting him to sleep that night (Mom has been a recent favorite) to sing “Lucy’s Song”. It is heartwarming to sit downstairs and hear Grant attempt to sing in the same style as Mr. Cocker. Grant has recently introduced some vibrato into his rendition.

So this week’s newsletter is obviously a little different than the past. It’s impossible for me to let a milestone with Lucy go by without talking about her and some of the impacts and learnings we experienced with her. While I wish more of you were able to meet her in person, I can offer as consolation that whenever you get to see or interact with Alyssa, Grant, myself or anyone else who met Lucy in person that there’s a bit of Lucy’s spirit living in all of us from the lessons she taught us.

Lucy, I am obviously trying, but I have to concede that absolutely no words can describe what your impact on our lives has been. We love you beyond measure.