Tag: grief
Pain – thank you for your service
Pain – thank you for your service
It’s weird, nowadays I usually have a clear idea of what I’m going to talk about when I sit down to write, it’s been some four years since I felt the need to write for the sake of writing, for the therapy of it rather than because I had something specific to say.
Let’s see where this goes.
I went to a funeral yesterday of a friend, Aleks who died aged 36.
I was incredibly struck by the beauty of the service and celebration after.
She was bright and bubbly. The service was bright and bubbly.
She was quirky and loved life. The service and celebration afterwards was equally as quirky and a celebration of her love of life.
She loved cocktails. I saw many people celebrating her love of cocktails at the celebration after the service also!
I thought I’d come a long way since Claire died and indeed I know I have but yesterday was a reminder that what happened on 17 April 2013 will always be with me.
I guess it served as yet another reminder that this healing process through grief is not necessarily about finding ways to make the pain go away, rather, it’s about finding ways to live with the pain. I genuinely don’t believe we can make that pain go away, that pain is always with us, always there, hiding in the background yet not in a dark and threatening sense.
The pain is there to serve as a reminder of all that we have lost and in that sense the pain is good.
I don’t believe we should shy away from feeling that pain, if it’s there, embrace it, welcome it, acknowledge it for the transient emotion that it is, thank it for its service and then let it go again until the next time.
As there will always be a next time.
The pain will always resurface and when it does we repeat the same process.
This is the new normal, this is the new life, this is the way things are now and probably will always be.
So today, I’m rejoicing in the knowledge that the intense love that Claire and I shared is still there through the pain that I experienced yesterday.
Love and pain at the same time… Another lesson in learning to let go and just experience what is…
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This post is dedicated to Aleks Morris. 15th of January 1982 – 28th of February 2018 and to her family and friends.
Aleks, You made me feel so welcome in my new house when I moved to Dorset 4 years ago. You shared laughter, wine and chocolate with us on many occasions, often quite loudly… I think I never told you I could hear you howling with laughter from over the road with my windows shut!
Thank you Aleks for all you brought to my life in the few years I’ve known you.
Farewell my friend.
It’s been 6 months
It’s been 6 months
It’s six months today since my beautiful Claire left us, so I have decided to read back through this blog at some of the old posts. When I set this website up I did it because I wanted to keep a record of how far I’d come, I knew it would be easy to spend my whole life wallowing in six months seems like a good time to reflect a little on how things are going.
The pain
On 21 April I wrote a post and it simply said ” I slept last night and got some respite from the pain” – I remember that pain, it was that sharp excruciating kind of pain that comes from a deep cut or broken bone. It was the kind of pain that I can imagine people banging their head against a wall to stop. That raw pain has stopped, it’s now a dull ache, the kind of ache that we get in our knees or back as we get older. The kind of continuous pain that we get used to living with, but is actually liveable with.
Days of firsts
On 29th of April I talked about a day of firsts. There are still many more ‘firsts’ to come which I know may be challenging. Christmas is the obvious big one but what I have realised is that the things we miss so much are the old habits, the way we used to do things, the things we used to say or the routines that we had got into. And what I know for sure is that Claire is not those routines – she is far more than that.
Knowing that means that I can remove the meaning to those routines and begin to look for new routines and habits to create a new vision of things like Christmas.
Moving house as been a big help in this, it has forced us to create some new routines and habits in a completely different environment. It has allowed us to separate the things around us from the memory of Claire and find a way to bring her memory into a new environment with our new routines and habits.
Feeling connected again
In May I wrote about feeling disconnected, I commented that it felt as though I have had something amputated. Oddly that feeling has completely gone now and I feel very much connected to my Claire. I still miss her terribly and sometimes the slightest thing sets me off.. When I have one of those moments it can feel like I haven’t come very far at all, but reading back to how I felt helps me to realise how much progress I’ve made.
Grief is a journey
I think what I have come to be aware of is that grief is an absolute journey. But it seems as though it’s a journey without an end.
I’ve recently joined an excellent Private group on Facebook made up exclusively of men that have lost their wives recently. It has been enormously helpful in being able to share my thoughts with a group of people that truly understand. A common theme with grief though seems to be the need to return to ‘normal’.
What I know for sure is that I need to let go of that terrible label ‘normal’. It’s simply a way of describing how things used to be and clearly they aren’t like that any more, so the idea of ‘normal’ actually has no meaning at all.
My challenge for the next six months is to work on accepting our new ‘normal’. Life is totally different now and it always will be which I guess is why grief is such a journey. As a family we need to continue to build our new habits and routines and find ways to include the memory of Claire so that this becomes our new, and perfectly acceptable ‘normal’.
The grief jungle
I feel like someone on a journey hacking a path through the jungle, with absolutely no idea where I’m going and even struggling at times to keep going. Yet I can also imagine that if I were to take a moment and just look back at where I had come from I would see it clearly worn path which is clear and ready for the kids to tread.
I’ve still no idea where I’m going, but I’m going to keep on hacking as at least I’m making progress!
Grief “i just sit”
Grief “i just sit”
[PostScript added after I wrote this, please bear in mind as you read: I’m not going to kill myself so don’t worry, it’s just better that I write down truthfully how I feel rather than try and hide it in the hope that it helps not only myself but other people in the same situation as me]
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This is a rather odd post and it comes as the result of checking the words that people type in Google when they end up on this website. It seems lots of people are typing Grief “i just sit” – and ending up on my site, of course I don’t know why they typed that but I know where they are coming from.
The temptation to just sit and do nothing often reaches the point of being unbearable. I often feel like one of those deep cave explorers, sitting on the edge of an enormous black chasm, dangling my feet in, looking down and wondering what it’s like down there in the depths. Except the depths of this chasm are the depths of depression… And it’s very black down there.
The grief can often hit me in waves and sometimes all I can do is just sit. But when I sit I know that my feet dangling on the edge of the chasm and I could easily fall in.
The strange thing is that I was always terrified of death, but now with Claire passing so early in life it seems that if she can do it then it can’t be that bad. Dying doesn’t seem so bad any more and just writing that down strikes me as being odd, but I don’t care. This change in the way I view dying could make it seem like an easy option, an easy way to get rid of the pain.
I’m not contemplating killing myself or anything like that all I’m saying is that I can now understand the full process that could lead to it.
So how do I get up when all I want to do is sit?
One of the most liberating concepts that I adopt is the idea of choice.
If I want to get extremely angry then I can, it’s a choice.
If I want to shout and bellow and curse then I can, it’s a choice.
If I want to feel successful then I can, it’s a choice.
If I want to feel happy then I can, it’s a choice.
Once we truly accept that the way we feel is always a choice then we can choose to wallow in our own sadness or depression for a bit, but I can also choose to step out that sadness and depression. It’s a choice.
Now it may not be an easy choice, we may not have access to all of the resources we need in order to make that choice at that given moment, but those resources are there buried within us-all we have to do is look hard enough.
So sometimes I choose to just sit, and then I choose to get back up again. It’s MY choice.