Grief, Again

Moving through the five stages

Anhedonia: that’s what my therapist called it.

I lay on the bed in the back of my camper, head on my pillow, talking to her on speakerphone. It took me a second to register the word—hedonism meaning pleasure, and the prefix an- denoting its opposite. A web search defined anhedonia as the inability to experience joy. “You may feel numb or less interested in things that you once enjoyed,” according to the Cleveland Clinic’s website. “It’s a common symptom of many mental health conditions like depression.”

Or grief, I thought. 

It had been four weeks since Seth and I had seen the two small children we could have adopted, and two weeks since we made the heartbreaking decision not to move forward with the match. 

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