Grief is universal. It precipitates comfort to share.
When my father died, I know my mother cried a lot. She also worried a lot. They had moved from the country into a small village, so she had neighbors and ready access to stores.
The house was big and old. She worried about the facilities, and with good reason, they all needed upgrading. Everything was old.
She really wanted to move in with one of her children. That was not doable. All of us were working long hours and she would’ve been really isolated for the majority of the days.
There was no good way to comfort her. Her line of communication was the phone. She would wait for one of us, or anyone else, to call. There was no Facebook, no Internet. There was a dog at some point in time that was hit and killed by a car. The neighbor's cat started coming and visiting her. She tried not to get too attached to it, knowing that so many of her other animals had come to grief. She secretly welcomed the cat, however.
When my spouse died, I didn’t cry. I was too numb. I was totally devastated, even though my loved one had dementia and was slipping away day-by-day and year-by-year, the fact was that my spouse was still there. The inevitable loss to me was earth shattering.
I coped by keeping busy. There were house projects. I wanted to start a business. The house projects were accomplished successfully. The business was not. It didn’t get off the ground.
I started to write. My words brought my inner feelings and observations into the light. I was able to actively grieve.
I began to see purpose where before there was just time-filling.
I wondered if my journey would resonate with others who had experienced major losses.
Grief is universal. Where there is a loss, there is grief, no matter how hard one tries to escape it. It is there. There are all sorts of self-defeating behaviors and denial and self-pity that does happen as a consequence, if one permits it.
Grief is there. Waiting for an opening to emerge, to knock the griever down, to take its toll.
Patricia Cornwell, in one of her fiction novels, shares that grief adheres, it doesn’t want to let go of loss because to do that, one would have to accept that loss has occurred. What we had is gone.
Grief has to be experienced to be resolved.
I set about accepting the idea that to heal, I had to grieve.
I started to write seriously, to let my words express my loss and my grief.
I wanted to share the journey I knew I had begun. I wanted to start a blog. I was fortunate to have a master blog team that made that happen.
My fellow grievers are not readily accessible. They are my age. They are not much into the Internet. They have a limited following on Facebook and other social media.
You, Facebook and Social Media junkies, are their children.
What would it take for you to introduce your mothers and aunts and significant others to me?
Would they like to share my journey? Would it be a benefit? We travel a similar path. Would this be a way to comfort them as they sit crying in their chairs? To know they are not the only ones thrown into a dark hole by their loss?
This is your challenge. Not tossing something in the air and seeing if you can catch it on your nose, not coaxing her/them to sit your dog while you are off on a trip and not buying her/them an unneeded or unwanted gift.
Do you have the patience to show and write directions for her/them to join me?
Your other challenge, if you are one with the loss, is to accept that loss has occurred. Grief will adhere without acceptance. It has to be experienced to be resolved.
I hope you will encourage her/them, and yourselves, to know there is a friend here. I care.
Sincerely,
Lynn Brooke
© 2023 Our New Chances
Photo Credit: © 2023 Rachel Gareau
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