I had been writing my post about what to do with grief in my head all week long. Last week…before I got sidetracked with Friday’s unraveling of events – the subject of my next post. Yet, I wanted to still put this out there…my random meandering thoughts for those of you who I know are right now also in this part of the life right along with me…for those that have been there that hopefully can add to my understanding of this process…and for those that will be there someday.
Grief I have come to realize is something I really don’t understand and something, even with all my losses in my life, I don’t think I have ever really done…or allowed myself to do. It seems the more I become aware of it in my life, the more I am learning it is misunderstood by many of us. We seem to feel like it is a bad thing…something that should be avoided or at least minimized. Something we should help others through as quickly as possible.
Yet, as you will see in my next post…it has so many amazing, health benefiting properties. It is not something that can be rushed or understood fully. It is really a mystical aspect of our humanness…a gift to us. For if we didn’t have grief and a grieving process…we could potentially become very disconnected, heartless, lost individuals wandering around trying to act like adults but really trapped inside a childish outlook on life, desperately clinging to a reality that is not true…
So far this is what I had planned on sharing about my grieving before getting knocked over again by yet another earthquake this last Friday:
…… I had all these plans of sharing my new favorite author Anne Lammot’s nuggets of gold about grief and what it looked like for her. Of how she talked about the passing of her best friend Pammy and how the pieces of Pammy that were wedged into her soul she wished with all her might she could purge herself of. Yet, then she realized that if she was able to get rid of those pieces..then she wouldn’t still have her friend with her. That even though these pieces were painful, they were part of her, part of Anne’s make-up now. These parts of Pammy had shaped and molded Anne…and in the end getting rid of them was not the solution. Finding out how to integrate them into herself was the goal…and that sometime tears filling up your snorkel goggles was the only thing that could help to do this.
……. I wanted to share the beautiful story of Tear Soup and the truths this author shares in her story – meant as a childrens’ book to help kids learn how to grieve and go through grief. How this book allowed me to realize that there is no rhyme and reason to grief…that there is no right nor wrong…and that everyone’s “Tear Soup” is unique to them. That sometimes there is nothing you can do for others who are grieving but to just sit with them.
……… I wanted to share that grief really never goes away…that even after 25 years after the death of my mother, I still feel the sting of her loss and absence in my life as much now as ever…and that maybe that is okay. That if I stop grieving her loss, that in a way I stop letting her live inside my heart, my being. If I stop grieving, she stops being part of my make-up of who I am…and I lose part of myself.
…….. I wanted to share that I have come to realize that grieving is a necessary part to life –
– no matter who you are,
– what state you are in: married, single or in between,
– or what you have lost: a person to death, divorce or a move; a childhood dream; a job; a part of your soul or even some belief or stance about who God is
……….for this grieving process allows us to identify whatever it is that we have lost, allows us to to find the good and get rid of the bad…and allows us to integrate the loss into our beings in some mystical, unknown way…
