Tag: grief

Understanding

Few people talk about the grief that comes after ending toxic relationships. Intellectually, we know it’s for the best, but we also have suffered a deep loss many don’t understand. – Dr. Nicole LePera

This was an interesting tweet by Dr. LePera that got a lot of responses of relatability. One response was so interesting that I had to put it into one of my inspirational notebooks: “Sometimes the head takes the elevator, while the heart takes the stairs.” (@sparkleandcocoa)

Relationships are complicated because people are complicated. Just like people, many relationships have their good, healthy aspects and then their not-so-healthy characteristics. Some people can have healthy, loving, mutually satisfying relationships with people whom other people find to be completely toxic. Some people make excellent mentors or teachers or siblings, or leaders, but not so good spouses, parents, or friends, and vice versa. Some people are one person’s dream partner/parent/friend/relative/neighbor, etc. and at very same time can be another person’s nightmare partner/parent/friend/relative/neighbor. It’s all relative and complicated and based on individuals’ temperaments, personalities, needs, beliefs, passions and tolerances, and how well these elements match to one another.

The loss of any relationship whether it’s due to death, or to a choice, has to be processed and grieved. Nothing is black and white. Most relationships have at least some good aspects to them. If relationships were purely toxic, they wouldn’t have likely come into fruition in the first place. When you grieve a relationship, you not only grieve “what was”, but also “what could have been.” Endings indicate a need to process “what was”. “What could be” is no longer in the cards.

I always call grief the loneliest emotion, because even if two people are grieving the same person, or the same experience, everyone has to do grief in their own way, and in their own time. No one grieves in the same manner. Usually the same loss means a different kind of loss for each individual in a relationship. What is universal however, is that never is there a more important time in the world for gentleness and kindness and understanding and empathy, then when someone is grieving.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Mother Bear

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

My husband was giddy yesterday, talking about the football games that had happened over the weekend with his officemates. Mondays at the office can be rough, yet my husband seemed to be in a particularly good mood. Football is a unifier. Even if you aren’t a big sports fan, you still usually have “a team” because it is the team of the city where you live, or your city of birth, or the university you attended. You identify with your team and your fellow fans. You feel united with an energy bigger than yourself.

I know that this overwhelming outpouring for the Queen of England, before she is put to rest with Prince Philip, is hard for some people to understand. There is a reason why western civilization has evolved away from monarchies and aristocracies. The Queen herself was essentially a figurehead, yielding not much more than what they call “soft power”, which is more of an influence, than any right to demand. And there are a lot of questions as to whether the monarchy is even necessary, or should be supported, considering its sometimes sordid past.

I believe that the grief which is being shown over the death of Queen Elizabeth, the world over, is an outpouring of the loss of a long-standing, consistent, unflappable, dedicated being whom anyone could claim as their own favorite, if they so chose. In a world so full of change that seems to be happening at the speed of light, a world so full of stark polar opposition in our politics, a world that seems to be questioning and rewriting so many of our long standing traditions, laws, and rituals, we cling to the things that are steadfast. We cling to the people and the things that will be there for us, in some form or other, no matter what else is happening. We cling to football, and “the holidays”, and pizza, and classic movies and ageless songs, and the moon and the stars, and all of the things that have stood the test of time, because these are the things that unite us, and the things that we can mostly agree on (even with playful rivalries). In a world of heightened disagreement and divisiveness, we cling to the things that we can all dedicate ourselves to – we cling to the things that are available to all of us, to claim as our own. We cling to anything that reminds us that despite all of our differences, we all make up one humanity. We cling to the people and the institutions which allow us the shared security and enthusiasm to unite with each other, and to band together over shared loves and losses.

The whole world seems to have lost a symbolic, steadfast grandmother when Queen Elizabeth died. Just like our own grandmothers, she wasn’t perfect. She made mistakes. But she was utterly dedicated and dutiful to her family, to her responsibilities, and to what was required of her. There was no question that the Queen was on the watch, and she wasn’t going to stop, until it was time for her to pass on. I think that so many of us can relate. So many of us have been supported by strong, determined women, who see “their duties” out to the very end, with a steely dedication to do right, by what life has required of them. I mean no disrespect to my male readers here, but in my experience, it comes more naturally for women to fully dedicate themselves to something more than just themselves. Look at nature. No one wants to run into a mother bear. We have lost a universal mother bear. This hollow sadness and almost disbelief which so many of us are feeling about this loss of the longstanding queen – this sadness is something that actually unites us. And that is why we are carrying on our grief, as long as we can. Feeling united feels good, even in times of pain.

Cycles

When endings come in life either through death, or divorce, or moving to a new house, or changing jobs, or children growing up, I’ve come to understand how complicated the grief of this situation can be. When endings come, you don’t just grieve the loss of the person, or the loss of the place, or the loss of the thing, you also grieve the loss of yourself that has identified strongly with that person, or that place or that thing, or that function, or that title. Even though we are human beings, there is a huge part of us who identifies ourselves by what we do, and we label ourselves accordingly. For me, I have many labels: I am a wife, mother, daughter, sister, niece, cousin, in-law, friend, homemaker, writer/blogger, American, Florida resident, JMU graduate, UF parent, Pittsburgh native, avid reader, dog owner, animal lover, boater, walker, mentor, deep thinker, adventurer, brown-eyed girl . . . . The point that I am making is that any of these labels that I identify myself as, can change (and have changed over the years) through death, moves, job changes, health changes, relationship changes, aging, world events (hello, 9/11 and the pandemic) etc. So when we are having a hard time letting go of someone, something, or some place, a lot of that difficulty of letting go, is the letting go of that function, or that label that connects us to the person, the place, the pet, the job, the house, the title etc. In order to let go, it feels like we almost have to cut off a piece of our own selves, that is still clinging to make this part of our lives, an ongoing part of our present circumstances. We have a hard time surrendering this person, place, or function, or thing, to our past, because we still desperately want it to be part of our present. We aren’t ready to sever that part of ourselves.

With the ailing of our extended family member, I’ve been reflecting a lot on grief and why it is so hard and unique to each individual. A lot of how hard you grieve someone or something, is how much you sunk your whole self into a relationship or a situation. When endings come around, you have to face that the definition of whatever you are grieving – the relationship, the place, the role, is soon coming to a close. There is no going back and changing it and making it different anymore. It is what it is, becomes the final statement. And so when you are packing up your things from your desk, or when you are turning in your keys, or you are signing your divorce papers, or you are attending a graduation, or a retirement party, or a funeral, you are giving away a little chunk of yourself. You are closing out a chapter on YOU. And that is so incredibly hard.

There are so many endings in life. Life is cyclic in nature. Summer is soon coming to a close. Many people have already experienced their long anticipated summer vacations. And there is grief in these facts, for many people. But as the saying goes, for every ending, there is a new beginning. I can’t wait for the cooler weather of fall and even the overload of pumpkin spice everything. I hate saying good-bye to anything or anyone important to me, but I also love anticipating fresh, new hellos to what’s next in my life, and the new pieces of myself that these new, fresh hellos will reveal to me.

“There is no real ending. It’s just the place where you stop the story.” – Frank Herbert

Good Good-Byes

I spent two hours this weekend watching a video on closure and “good good-byes”. My mentees are a graduating senior in high school, and a fifth grader who is about to enter middle school. I have mentored them for three years, and this is the year in which it makes sense for all of us, to part ways from our regular weekly meetings. I am struggling greatly with this. I am quite fond of both girls and I am deeply concerned about doing this, in the healthiest way possible. I have never been good at good-byes.

The person who ran the video seminar I watched is a grief counselor. She kept repeating the idea that any change is a loss (even a change that we deem as a “good” change) and the natural response to loss is grief. I am a deep feeler. I am already feeling grief and concern about our good-byes. Unfortunately, in the past, when saying good-bye to people whom I worked for/with, or neighbors from previous neighborhoods, or even childhood friends, I don’t think that I did a great job expressing my sorrow about the change, to the people concerned, or even admitting my sorrow to myself. I tend to be too abrupt. I may have come across that I cared much, much less than what I really was feeling about the change. I tend to have a “Buck up and move on!” attitude, and retrospectively, I don’t think that this response is the kindest response for anyone involved, including me. I want to do these good-byes to my mentees better than I have done good-byes in the past. I want to make these “good good-byes.” I have grown. I want to do this lovingly and gently for all parties concerned.

The leader of the seminar told us that we needed to start talking about our parting of ways, now, a few weeks away from our final meetings. People need time to process their thoughts and feelings. People need a chance to talk about their thoughts and feelings which they have processed, and this should occur over several days and weeks, not just in one moment. The “Buck up and move on!” part of me, is afraid of this. I don’t want to keep poking the bear/picking at the scab. It hurts. A lot. But ultimately, in the end, I don’t want to have regrets and unsaid sentiments which haunt me. These are two girls who have already suffered a great deal of loss in their young lives. I want our parting of ways to be one that is considered natural and healthy and part of life’s evolvement. I don’t want them to personalize this loss, in any way, shape or form. As one participant in the seminar reminded us, the adage, “Relationships are for a reason, a season, or a lifetime,” is true and all three kinds of relationships have their proper place in our lives.

Today is the first meeting with my girls, when I am going to start seriously broaching the subject of our “good-byes”. This is coming at a time when my youngest child is a couple months away from leaving our nest for college. There’s a little storm brewing inside of my heart, friends, to put it mildly. I think that my biggest fear is that this storm will turn into a raging monsoon and I will feel entirely out of control. I guess, if I am honest with myself, my biggest fear is being “out of control.” Which is funny because, as we all know, control is mostly an illusion anyway.

Saying goodbye to someone you love quote.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Scarface

If we believe that tomorrow will be better, we can bear a hardship today.
— Thich Nhat Hanh

Only people who are capable of loving strongly can also suffer great sorrow, but this same necessity of loving serves to counteract their grief and heals them.
— Leo Tolstoy

To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness.
— Erich Fromm, psychoanalyst

All therapy is grief work. – Edith Eger, famous therapist who survived the Nazi Camps

About five years ago, I went to a therapist, as I was working through some “stuff” that was happening in my life, and I was wanting some professional insight on how I could better deal with my “stuff”. Living with the fears and the uncertainties that come from my son’s epilepsy, was a major part of that “stuff.” Despite completely believing in the value of therapy, and despite knowing that it is the strongest people in the world who admit that they have problems, and seek to change for the better, I still felt vulnerable and embarrassed about being in therapy. I take pride in “keeping it all together.” I consider myself to be a pretty responsible person. I became extremely concerned about what my therapist was writing in “my chart.” So, one day, I point-blank asked him (with some admitted trepidation), “So what’s my diagnosis? What are you writing down there?”

“It’s simple,” he said, “You are grieving.”

Grieving is hard. And it’s not just about losing the ones we love. It’s about coming to terms with how truly vulnerable we are in life and what little control we really have in what happens around us. We grieve different stages in our lives being over with. We grieve lost opportunities and relationships that end. We grieve about mistakes which we have made. Grief is exhausting and overwhelming at times, but if we don’t let ourselves do it, we shut off the valve to all feelings and sensations and emotions. A lot of people who end up shutting off that valve to the normal cycles of feelings and emotions, end up with terrible personality disorders and debilitating addictions, which ironically, ends up making relationships, and even life itself, even harder to navigate and to experience. We have the ability to cycle through, and to experience our feelings, even our grief feelings. Our minds, and our bodies, and our souls were designed to experience the awe of all of it. We must trust this fact, in order to experience the true fullness of our lives.

This same therapist gave me a visual for grief that I have always found to be the most helpful information that he ever gave to me. I believe that I have written about this on the blog before, but this visual analogy is good enough to be worth repeating. It truly helps:

When we first experience a trauma, our wound is deep, and bloody, and so painful that it’s scary, and often overwhelming in its ugly searingness. Anything that even comes close to touching that wound, puts us in scorching pain. We are fearful and sensitive to anything that might so much as graze our vulnerable wound. Eventually, though, that wound starts to scab over. It becomes a little less sensitive to the touch. It doesn’t need as much hyper-vigilant protection. But of course, as life goes on, something happens related to our initial trauma, and that scab gets ripped right back off, and the healing process has to begin all over again. This can happen many times. But finally, after enough time and patience and growth and love and self-care, the wound becomes a scar. The scar never goes away, but it is not nearly as painful to the touch, as it was, when it was a fresh wound, or a even when it was a scab. The scar serves as a reminder of the pains which we have survived. The scar serves as a reminder of just how strong we truly are, and the truth about just how much we really feel and love and give, to the one and only life which we have been gifted to experience. In that sense, scars honestly can be the most beautiful parts of us. Scars remind us of just how much we have lived, and how much we have loved.

Are you passing on love or are you passing on pain? Heal your pain and pass on love.

Hold On

This has been a really hard week for us. Yesterday, my uncle died unexpectedly, in his sleep. Due to COVID, his memorial services will be delayed for quite some time. We are having to comfort our loved ones from afar. It all feels like just way too much, right now. This is my “go-to song”, when the waters of life get really rough.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Le-3MIBxQTw

Bless my heart, bless my soul.
Didn’t think I’d make it to 22 years old.
There must be someone up above sayin’,
“Come on, Brittany, you got to come on up.
You got to hold on…
Hey, you got to hold on…”

So, bless my heart and bless yours too.
I don’t know where I’m gonna go
Don’t know what I’m gonna do.
There must be somebody up above sayin’,
“Come on, Brittany, you got to come on up!
You got to hold on…
Hey, you got to hold on…”

“Yeah! You got to wait!
Yeah! You got to wait!”
But I don’t wanna wait!
No, I don’t wanna wait…

So, bless my heart and bless my mind.
I got so much to do, I ain’t got much time
So, must be someone up above saying,
“Come on, girl! Yeah, you got to get back up!
You got to hold on…
Yeah, you got to hold on…”

“Yeah! You got to wait!”
I don’t wanna wait!
But I don’t wanna wait!
No, I don’t wanna wait!

You got to hold on…
You got to hold on…
You got to hold on…
You got to hold on…

Everyone, Together

“Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled.” -unknown

My daughter took this picture of the full moon last night. She and my second eldest son were fiddling around with his telescope and her fancy Nikon camera. It was such a beautiful, peaceful night under the glow of this absolutely gorgeous super moon. Everyone around the world witnessed the complete awesomeness of this lovely, beautiful moon last night. At this current time in history, everyone around the world is experiencing pain, loss and fear from the pandemic, but at the same time, everyone around the world was gifted with the beauty and the glow of this gorgeous moon and the gifts that the moon brings to our oceans’ tides and to our shared wonder about the mystery of space. The above mentioned quote bears repeating:

“Shared grief is half the sorrow, but happiness when shared, is doubled.” -unknown

What we are going through right now, is undoubtedly awful, but we are in it together. We will overcome this situation, together. We will prevail, together. We will lessen the heavy, burdensome load of each other’s grief, by carrying it together and the overwhelming happiness that we will feel when the trauma of the coronavirus finally passes, will be amplified to an unbelievable, magnificent degree because we will be feeling that staggering happiness, together. Everyone, together.

Just Hold On

Fortune for the day – “Patience makes lighter what sorrow may not heal.” – Horace

I’m not sure if I like how Horace worded the fortune. I decided to look up translations of the fortune and most of the translators said things that sounded a lot like, “Just be optimistic that you are going to feel better in the future.” I suppose that is the right translation of Horace’s statement. When we are in the middle of grieving something, it sometimes feels like the grief will never end. Someone once gave me an analogy to dealing with grief which I find to be very helpful. When we first experience something that causes us pain, it is a stabbing, searing cut to our soul. It is a horrific pain, but we must allow ourselves to feel the pain, in order for it to eventually heal over, in a healthy way. If we don’t feel it and acknowledge it and cleanse it and nurse it, the grief can become a festering, infected pain that spreads all over us and spills on to others, like a disease. Some things that cause us grief, are slight, like a brush burn. They cause us pain for a brief moment, but then the event is over and the pain scabs over quickly and heals completely, and that pain is easily forgotten. Some grieving that we experience is like, initially large, deep, deep gashes, some so penetrating that they even feel life threatening. However, if just we hold on (sometimes just holding on, a much longer while, than we would like) and breathe through the pain, after a while, the gash starts to scab over. It is still tender when it is touched, but it is not nearly as painful, as the initial shock of the experience that caused us grief. Sometimes the scab will get ripped off again, by an event related to our grief, but this time we know that it will heal more quickly than the initial wound did. Finally, if we hang on long enough, the grief scab turns into a scar. The scar is always there to remind us of the pain that we experienced, but it has healed to a point where it can even be poked at, and the pain is barely felt anymore.

It’s not over ’til it’s all been said
‪It’s not over ’til your dying breath
‪So what do you want them to say when you’re gone?‬
‪That you gave up or that you kept going on?‬‪What do you do when a chapter ends?‬
‪Do you close the book and never read it again?‬
‪Where do you go when your story’s done?‬
‪You can be who you were or who you’ll become
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh oh, ‪if it all goes wrong
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh oh, darling just hold on

‪The sun goes down and it comes back up
‪The world it turns no matter what
Oh-oh-oh, oh-oh-oh oh, if it all goes wrong
Darling, just hold on (Steve Aoki, Louis Tomlinson – Just Hold On (Lyrics)

Never Lose Hope

In light of all of the painful world’s events that have occurred in just this short time, I think that this wisdom from the Dalai Lama is so correct:

“There is a saying in Tibetan, ‘Tragedy should be utilized as a source of strength.’
No matter what sort of difficulties, how painful experience is, if we lose our hope, that’s our real disaster.” 
― Dalai Lama XIV

I hope that you have a reflective, restful day off (if you are fortunate enough to have this Labor Day off) and enter into another fall season, refreshed and hopeful. Over the weekend, a dear friend of mine’s son, tragically lost one of his dearest friends. I wrote to him that every friendship that I have ever had, whether long or short, has affected my life and in essence, has become a part of, and helped to form, who I am, at my very core. So, in essence, those friendships will be with me forever. In that same sense, every tragedy and every triumph that we experience in our lifetimes, also becomes a part of who we are and helps to form us, and to grow us, individually and collectively. Thus, nothing is for naught.

Sacredness in Tears

I don’t have words today. Everything that I write seems trivial and wrong and ridiculous. You see, one of my good friends, a friend who has been so supportive of my writing and of my blog, is going through one of the worst pains imaginable for a parent. She lost her child. And nothing I say or write or do, can take that pain away. My heart is breaking for her. She is bearing her own pain, plus the pain of her husband and her other children. All that I can do for her, right now, is to pray for comfort and peace, for both she and her family. I ask you for your prayers for my friend and for her family as they travel that treacherous, long, rocky road called Grief. I love you, friend. I’m here for you.

“There is a sacredness in tears. They are not the mark of weakness, but of power. They speak more eloquently than ten thousand tongues. They are the messengers of overwhelming grief, of deep contrition and of unspeakable love. ” – Washington Irving