Please continue sharing
I’ve just had another one of those moments when I’ve realised something and I want to get it down in writing as soon as possible.
Because of this website I’ve been in contact with so many other people that have lost their partners that I decided to set up a secret Facebook group for us all to chat. We currently have 15 ‘members’ and we share our stories and thoughts with each other and I want to share with you a brief story from the group.
People often say to me that my story is shocking, we lost Claire so rapidly, she was seemingly fighting fit in the morning and gone by the evening – no history of any illness, no signs and no symptoms until her body started to shut down. We had no time to say goodbye, in fact we didn’t know that we needed to because we just thought she had a stomach bug.
A good friend of mine shared their story this morning and mentioned that their partner had cancer and went from 14 stone down to 5 stone. When I read that post I actually spoke out loud to myself in shock. I was just stunned that someone could lose so much weight.
Now here’s the rub, if anyone loses someone prematurely it’s always shocking, we all have that shocking story because dying young is just not the natural course of things. Our tendency in today’s society is to not talk about death, and I admit to completely ignoring the subject myself up until 17th of April this year. But if we do talk about our feelings and share our stories we can quickly realise that we are not alone. In the darkness of our own thoughts and in the pain of our own stories it can feel like a terribly lonely place, and when we share we can realise that the world is full of beautiful and lovely people who genuinely do understand what we’re feeling.
So I would encourage you to share your own story. Don’t be afraid to tell others about how you really feel, I bet you’ll discover they have a shocking story to tell too and suddenly neither of you are alone any more.
To the people that are sharing their stories with me, thank you, thank you, thank you.