Year: 2017
Climbing the mountain of grief
Climbing the mountain of grief
Sometimes, when we begin our journey into grief and loss we see the huge mountain of this life we need to live rising up in front of us… massive, craggy, insurmountable.
But if we stand there long enough, surveying the surroundings we may notice there is another way up, we reach the same destination but the journey is simpler, easier and more beautiful than we could ever have imagined.
One Final Act
One Final Act
It was a strange day on Saturday. We scattered Claire’s ashes, finally, 4 years after she died.
She had an absolute love for Cornwall, particularly one specific small beach near Falmouth. I remember visiting with her many times and I just happened to recall one passing conversation where she had said that this was where she wanted to be. She loved the sea with a passion, she wanted to live by the sea and walk by the sea every day (one of the most difficult things to clear out when she died was her HUGE collection of EVERY copy of Coast Magazine!).
I feel as though I have done one final thing for her, and I feel privileged to have been the person who carried out her very last wish.
Her life certainly does seem complete now, she was created through her parents as they consumed the nutrients provided by the Earth, she’s now gone back to be part of those nutrients of the Earth again… her circle of life seems complete.
There is now nothing more I can ever do for her, my one final act as her husband has come to pass.
I feel peaceful, I feel a sense of completeness & I feel a sense of satiated duty, but most of all I feel honoured to have been part of her life and to have been able to do what she wanted.
In some strange sense I feel that had I have died first that the passing conversation we had about where she wanted to be laid to rest would have died with me and that when her time came she may have missed out. What an honour she blessed me with.
Enjoy Cornwall my love, you’re forever part of it now.
A Lesson of Longing or Acceptance
A Lesson of Longing or Acceptance
When our partner dies we often ask ourselves the question “when will I feel normal again?” or “when will I stop feeling like this?”.
I think there is a great lesson to be learnt from this longing of the way we think we should feel.
That lesson is a lesson of accepting the way we feel, however that way is.
When we accept the way we feel we open up the possibility of feeling happy with it and also we give opportunity to feeling something different.
If we have a predetermined longing to feel a certain way then we close down our mind to the endless possibilities that are out there.
When we truly accept the way we feel and are happy with that then I think we are making progress.
I think.
Therefore I am!
When will the pain stop?
When will the pain stop?
When will the pain stop?
When will I stop feeling like THIS?
Both questions I hear many times from widows and widowers.
Claire and I were together for almost 30 years, the intensity of the love that we had for each other was immense.
The intensity of that love continues and I have no wish for it to die with her.
Because the intensity of the love that I have for her continues in her absence the pain continues also.
I have no desire for the intensity of love to stop, ergo, the pain will not stop either.
I have two choices.
- Fight the pain.
- Accept the pain.
Fighting the pain is committing to a life of futility and struggle, the conflict will always be there, lose the pain and lose the intensity of love, two sides of the same coin.
Accepting the pain is making a choice… making a choice is taking action… making a choice is doing something and is choosing. When we choose we take control and taking control is uplifting.
The pain will never stop but as time goes on I find ways to deal with it, accept it and choose to live with it.
I choose to stop fighting… Do you?
Day Zero
Day Zero
For the year after Claire died I wrote so many blog posts and every one of those contained so much pain. In recent times the blog posts have been more positive and uplifting… But sometimes the pain returns.
It’s my youngest daughter’s 18th birthday today.
Claire and I had 4 kids, all close together, 4 under 4 years old at one point!
It was really tough with no time to think or do anything for ourselves… All there was were the kids.
About 10 years ago Claire started to count down the years, months and days to when she considered herself ‘free of parental responsibility’ when the youngest was 18.
Every time the kids kicked off, she’d smile at me and say through gritted teeth “7 years, 3 months and 2 days to go”. We laughed. Sometimes.
She told all of the kids (and me) that when she was free of parental responsibility that she was having a year sabbatical. No cooking, no washing, no cleaning, only doing things that she wanted to do.
When she died the countdown was at 3 years 11 months.
Today it’s at zero.
The one thing that I’ve discovered over this past four years is that whenever there is pain this can be helped by taking a ‘learning’ from the situation.
When we learn something it’s a positive, we can either learn something that we should do or learn something that we shouldn’t do… Either way we can improve our lives for the future.
So what have I learnt this time?
I’ve learned that:
- This pain will never go away, it’s part of me, it’s part of [my] life.
- What happened to us as a family will continue to impact us when we least want it to, birthdays and anniversaries are no exception.
- Putting life on hold isn’t worth it..
- Be clear about why we are delaying doing things we want to do and ask ourselves the question “What does this thing I want to do in the future get for me? And how can I have that, at least in part, now?”, That thing we are putting off may get us freedom, enjoyment, fulfilment, excitement or something else… Why delay those feelings, let’s look for other ways to enjoy them now, whilst we can.
Today is a day of very mixed emotions. I’m totally excited for my daughter, happy in so many ways and yet, at the same time so desperately sad that Claire never saw her day zero.
Or perhaps she did…
The paradox of death and living
The paradox of death and living
When someone close to us first dies we can be lost in the depths of grief and despair and unable to think beyond the next second.
Every second is pain.
But as time goes on we find we can live two seconds before the pain hits us again, then it turns to minutes, then hours, then days.
We still think about the person we have lost 24/7 but we don’t experience that deep depth of despair every second like we used to.
And yet, the true paradox is that living second by second is truly living. If we focus on the now then nothing else matters and we are truly alive, living for the moment.
Paradoxically, that deep depth of despair, second by second living can also be a path to truly living, if we let it!
What a paradox!