grieving Archives - Adulting: Second- Half

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.

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.

Outpouring

When I experience some of my worst days in any one year, my emotions hit me hard. I’m a fire sign and I am deep. My emotions come at me hard, Miley Cyrus style – like a wrecking ball. I experience my emotions fast and furious. I usually give myself some mope time when I am really sad and disheartened. It is my way of acknowledging my feelings and letting myself feel them. I typically look a mess, and I keep my bed unmade so I can crawl into it and cry into my pillow whenever I feel like it. When I indulge in some mope time, I find that I am able to inch to the other side of it, faster than I would, than if I just powered through it all and pretended it away. I know myself. I don’t like feeling lousy for long. I get tired of feeling down and blah. I get tired of my droopiness. I know that I won’t get lost in the abyss because my natural state is to be upbeat and hopeful.

When I go through something hard, my first thoughts are totally dramatic. I write this blog every single day and on days that something hits me really hard, like my son’s seizure earlier this week, I ask myself, how do I write my blog? How can I possibly write my blog? Maybe I should just shut my blog down! These feelings arise because I can’t stand dishonesty. I am not a good pretender. I wear my heart on my sleeve. But the thing is, I love this blog. I love to write. I love to connect with you, my beloved readers. I find myself through my writing, which feels and seems to be particularly important at this middle stage of my life, for some unknown reason. As you know, I write this blog when I am on vacation (back when there was such a thing) and on holidays. I write this blog when I am feeling amazing, and I write this blog when I feel like shit. Writing this blog is part of my every day breath. This blog is one of my fondest creations, besides my children, of course.

I won’t tell you every detail of my life. I honor and respect the privacy of my family and of my friends, and that is what is most sacred to me. But I won’t lie to you – that would be like lying to myself, and this blog is an outpouring of pure me. People have expressed to me that they read my blog for inspiration and that makes me happy. I love to add inspiration and hope to this world. I will tell you that even in my darkest times, I love life. I am so grateful for all of the good in this world and there is so, so much of it. Goodness prevails and it seeps out of the least expected places, many, many times. Anyway, I am crawling out of my mope fest each day, and I am saying to you, I love you. Thank you for being here, and the blog stays. See you tomorrow.

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)

An Important Lunch

I had lunch yesterday with two people who I share history with and who I care about, and I felt the need to reach out to them. They both were in a very acute state of grief, as someone whom they loved with all of their hearts, had passed on recently. I admittedly was very nervous prior to the lunch. I wanted to be there for them, and I wanted to give my condolences face-to-face, but I was also fearful, anticipating what this lunch could look like. Would there be tears? Yes, there were tears, of course. And it felt healing, cleansing and real for all of us. Would there be laughter? Yes, shared memories and fond recollections often bring on laughter. Yes, there was laughter – laughter without shame. And it felt healing, cleansing and real for all of us. Would I say some stupid, thoughtless things that I wish I could push back into my mouth, the minute that they were said? Yes, I always do that. I’m a curious person with a dubious filter. But surprisingly, my honest, earnest questioning was met with thoughtful answers and gratefulness for a space to talk and to process what had happened. People sense where your heart is, even when the words don’t quite seem to match.

When I was in college, one of my dear friends and roommates lost her mother to cancer. I remember her saying that after the funeral and being surrounded by all of the love and support that she received during those acute first days of her loss, it was then, shattering to have everyone just “disappear.” My loved ones expressed the same sentiment yesterday. It’s not that people don’t care and it’s not that the people who are suffering a loss, even in their deepest troughs of grief, don’t understand that life must go on. It’s just that sometimes other people seem to go out of their way to avoid grieving people, mistakenly believing that the grieving people don’t want to talk or don’t need to express their feelings. Sometimes people avoid grieving people in fear that they may trigger raw emotions in the people suffering the loss. Sometimes people are afraid of saying “the wrong thing”, but saying nothing, or avoiding grievers, is far worse than accidentally saying the “wrong thing”, according to those who are grieving a loved one. Keeping the loved one’s memory alive is the most important thing to someone missing someone they loved with every inch of their hearts and of their souls. They want to be able to share all of those memories, because those memories are now all that they have left of their precious loved one.

People let you know what they need from you, especially when they are emotional. My daughter felt like her first day of try-outs for the tennis team at her school went terribly the other day, and when I picked her up, she got into the car and cried angrily for 15 minutes. Any time that I tried to interject with questions or positive affirmations, she stormily made it clear that she did NOT want to talk, in that moment. I understood. I backed off and later, she did want some comfort and she was up to answering my questions. My daughter did not hold it against me that I tried to be there for her from the “get go”, though. She knew that my heart was in the right place and later, she told me that she was grateful.

It’s brave to be there for people, whose emotions lie just under the surface, like a stormy, unpredictable current just waiting to flow and to burst through a dam of pent-up frustration and pain. I think sometimes we fear honest, real, raw emotion in others because then we have to own up to our own currents and frustrated dams that were never given enough release. But when the dams are released, the feeling of relief and the calm that soothes us right afterward, is just so healing for everyone involved in the process. The connection and understanding and empathy is enough to help each other transition through the process and stages of grieving. So when in doubt, reach out. You are strong enough to experience a person in pain and they are grateful enough to experience a person who is not totally comfortable with what to do or with what to say. It’s our hearts that connect in moments like these, and that is all of the connection that really matters. This connection helps our collective currents to then flow freely and calmly down the river of our Lives.

The Art of Living

This was a tough weekend. It put my emotions over the top this morning, to open the news and see the picture of Sully, President George H. W. Bush’s service dog sleeping by his casket. RIP – President Bush, a true American patriot. It does warm my heart to picture President Bush and Barbara Bush and their precious daughter, reunited.

Losing a pet is so tough because they are such a part of your daily routine. Lacey loved to sleep under my desk, by my feet, while I wrote. I loved the feel of her warm fur on my bare feet, while I was writing. Please excuse my writing for a while until I find my footing again. I lost a little bit of my heart and soul yesterday. I know that you are not supposed to have favorites and as an animal lover, I have had the privilege of sharing my life with many wonderful pets over the years, but Lacey was very special to me. She and I shared a unique bond. She was my favorite and I am heartsick.

I was reading that grieving tends to bring up a lot of your other unresolved grief. By middle age, unfortunately a lot of us have a fairly big pile of unresolved grief, as most of us have not perfected the skill of accepting our sadness and allowing ourselves to move through it. Maybe each new grief should be looked at as a chance to resolve old pains and to smooth down some oozing scabs on the heart. These scabs can then be made to be less fresh and vulnerable, and turned to smoother, fainter scars.

Shakespeare said, “A light heart lives long.” I imagine a heart with some mostly healed scars is lighter and beats easier, than a heart with oozing, gaping wounds and dark, crusty scabs. I plan to look at this time of grieving as a chance to make my heart lighter by working through my pain, so that my unresolved wounds can turn to fainter scars and my heart can feel light again.

“All the art of living lies in the fine mingling of letting go and holding on.” – Havelock Ellis

Good Grief

Obviously when a child leaves the nest it’s inevitable that you will go through the process of some grieving. Grief. It’s a word, a process, an experience that we all want to avoid. In fact, I’m sure a lot of my readers right now are going, “Okay, time to X out of this page.” My husband likes to say that no one gets to middle age without going through at least one “major biggie.” And most of us have gone through more than one “biggie” by this time in our lives. Grief is an obvious outcome when we lose someone we love deeply or a long term relationship ends. There are a lot of support systems out there to help us with that expected type of grief journey. In fact, even when our aged, grumpy old man of a dog died last year at the ripe old age of at least 15 (he was a rescue, so his age was sort of up in the air), my vet handed us a 20 page booklet on how to deal with the grief of the loss of a pet.

They say that there are five stages of grief. Denial. Anger. Bargaining. Depression. Acceptance. The annoying thing about these stages is that they are not linear; you get to be-bop back and forth between them. Just when you think you are past one of these stages, something sets you back and you feel like you are at the beginning of it all over again. Grief is a lonely emotion. I’m sure that my husband and I are both grieving the fact that our nucleus family will never be the same structure that is has been for the past 22 years, but we are grieving it in different ways and be-bopping through the stages at different paces and tempos. Loving friends and family can empathize and support us through our grief, but their loving energies and prayers are just good sustenance in our backpacks as we travel this road by ourselves, individually.

I used to feel guilty about grieving. A lot of the times, the things that you grieve are also tied into exciting, happy new beginnings. I’m truly thrilled for son’s new opportunities and for the space that has been created in my life because he has moved on with his life. Every time that we moved to a new town, we grieved for our friends and neighbors, our jobs and our homes and the memories that would now be part of our past, but at the same time we were very excited for the newness of a new place, and for the experiences and people that would come with that new place. Grief can be major or minor. Heck, I grieved when my favorite perfume was discontinued and I could no longer even find it even on ebay!

One year one of my children’s yearbooks had a quote that said something to the affect that we grieve our moments in time because there is a deep understanding in us that the person we are right now in this time and place will never be the same person again. Even if we try to duplicate the experience, it can’t be the same because we aren’t the same person anymore. We are constantly changing due to our experiences and growth. So in this sense, we even grieve a former version of our own selves.

Grief is a multi-layered experience. When we are grieving someone or something, we often find old remnants of previous grieving that we thought we had already accepted. What a lovely surprise! Ha! I think the older I get, I have learned to stop labeling things as much as I used to do. Grief just is. We want to think of it is “bad” or “negative”, but it really isn’t either of those things. It’s just one of those aspects of us that proves to ourselves that we are deeply alive. I would definitely rather feel than to be numb. Why would I want to cut off the experience of feeling all of those times of pride, excitement, happiness, joy, peace, contentment, wonder, and mostly deep, deep love to avoid going through the pain of grief?? My son’s venturing out into the world towards his own adult adventures has sparked every emotion in me that I ever knew that I had, and if I accept this process and I allow this process instead of resisting it, I will come out the other end of it stronger and wiser than I have ever been before.