Tag: moving on
Grief and Kintsugi – Adding to The Beauty of What Was
Grief and Kintsugi – Adding to The Beauty of What Was
The Japanese art form called Kintsugi 金継ぎ “golden joinery” is the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer that is dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver or platinum. The artform, as a philosophy treats breakage and repair as part of the history of an object, rather than something to disguise.
It’s truly beautiful.
Kinsugi is a centuries-old art form which relies on a few guiding principles:
- Breaks and cracks should be emphasised rather than hidden or disguised.
- The repaired piece should be even more beautiful than the original.
- The repaired piece should have a second lease of life.
- The break or repair should be treated as part of the history of the object.
- Flaws and imperfections are something to be embraced.
All of this is held in perfect harmony with, and not contrary to the fact that the object was indeed beautiful in its first iteration, before it smashed.
Living with grief has many similarities.
Before Claire died I was very happy with my life, I wouldn’t want anything to change, life was beautiful with her.
And then this awful thing happened, my life was smashed apart, broken into a 1000 pieces.
I could stare at the all of those pieces and wish for that life to be reinstated. Somehow, magically those pieces should reform themselves, with no cracks, into the beautiful life it was before.
Except that will never happen.
So instead, I choose to treat the flaws and imperfections that were caused as something to be embraced. Those cracks are now part of my history, and as such add beauty.
Some people like the look of Kintsugi, some people might prefer the look of the item before. Neither are right. Neither are wrong.
Regardless of whether you like Kintsugi or not, there’s no going back. There’s no way to put things back the way they were before, so I’m moving forwards, celebrating the past and adding to it rather than taking away.
I don’t think this is a viewpoint we can clearly see immediately in the aftermath of the death of someone close to us.
It’s all too raw, too painful and we want nothing more than to have everything put back the way it was before.
I do however think there comes a point of acceptance. Acceptance of both the pain and the fact of the death.
The question then becomes, what do we do with that acceptance. Do we sit back and idly allow life to pass us by, everyday looking at the smashed pieces on the floor and wondering why we can’t put things back the way they were. Or, do we treasure all of those broken pieces and painstakingly reassemble what we can, with love, with care and by actually adding to the beauty of what was there before?
6 weeks to live
6 weeks to live
This picture popped up on my Facebook stream today as one of those memories.
When I first saw this photo I got caught up in remembering this holiday, it was the first one away with our new car and we wanted to test it towing a caravan. We made a little trip down to East Dorset for a few days.
Then I saw the date on the photograph, 22nd of February 2013 and I realised that when I took this photograph Claire only had 6 weeks to live.
What’s weird is that I can associate so well into this photograph that I can also associate with the knowledge that I only have six weeks left with my wife. The only thing is that I didn’t know.
It’s painful.
It brings it all back. Again!
But that’s the problem with time travel in our head, isn’t it?
We take today’s knowledge and implant it into yesterday’s experiences and end up with a weird mishmash of ‘now’ and ‘then’!
I’m not sure that’s entirely healthy.
So now I have to ask myself, what can I learn from this? If I don’t learn from this experience then I don’t continue to move forwards.
I guess the learning that can be taken is… What will be will be, what will come to pass will come to pass.
We have no control over it.
It will happen whether we welcome it, reject it, rejoice in it or fear it.
So the only option is to accept it.
That means accepting that right now everyone that is dear to me, and even myself, may only have six weeks to live.
The next question is, would I do anything different if I knew that?
How to support someone that is grieving
How to support someone that is grieving
If we know someone that is grieving and want to offer them support, what can we say?
You may feel that the person you know is doing really well and want to offer them encouragement, however just saying to someone they are doing really well is not ‘seeing’ them.
As a human being we all want to be ‘seen’, we all want to be noticed and understood, sometimes when we grieving it can feel extremely lonely. If someone just says, “hey, you are doing really well”, it can feel like we’re not really being noticed, we can feel like “Oh no I’m not, I am struggling enormously and feel terrible”.
Acknowledging how a grieving person feels can help them feel ‘seen’, noticed, and understood and can help them with their grief and loss, particularly coping with grief very soon after the death. Rather than just say our grieving friend is doing well, if we ‘see’ them and notice their pain also this can help them through their difficult times.
Try saying something like, “I see how much you are struggling, I see how much pain you are in, I see how difficult this is for you and yet at the same time I see how well you are doing”, this time our grieving friend has the support and encouragement that they are doing well and we have also noticed the difficulties they are going through – they may now feel ‘seen’ , more understood and better supported.
Good luck…
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.
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!
Making time to grieve
Making time to grieve
Do you make time for grief? If you give yourself time and space… and by that I mean a specific time and space. I’ve found that it helps soooooo much in the grieving process!
Let me know what you think in the comments below.
… I can’t…
… I can’t…
When I first thought about it I thought “I can’t…”
But I’m now at a place where “I can begin to consider the possibility and imagine the options of what it would bring when I can” – and that is a far better place to be.
Good bye old, hello new
Good bye old, hello new
So many people are sending the messages and e-mails in response to my blog posts, thank you, please keep them coming you are not bothering me, you are not annoying and it genuinely helps.
Each time someone responds I have a new realisation, and here is one of those.
Here is a snippet of what was sent to me yesterday:
I realised that the loss of <<name removed>> had changed me forever, and importantly I realised that this was OK.
I know that I have changed, and with my training as a coach I recognise that my beliefs, values and decisions have all been jumbled up, reordered and have yet to settle.
I also realise that it is okay to change. It’s acceptable for me to reorder my beliefs, values and decisions to become a new person.
The battle I’m having at the moment is that I don’t want to! I put a lot of effort into my life up until 17 April 2013, a considerable amount of hard work went into my business, my personal life and especially my relationship. That hard work grounded my values and beliefs and ensured that they were all aligned to achieve the same goal. I was happy with that, it felt right and everything with the world was good.
All that has changed now, my beliefs and values have changed immeasurably and it’s so hard to let go of the way things were because of the hard work that I put into all that. And the truth is I don’t really want to let go but similarly I guess I need to as a key component of all of that i.e. Claire is now missing.
If you are happy in your relationship with your partner imagine being told that you have to abandon all of that, completely walk away and change everything. You would be pretty loathed to do so wouldn’t you, and understandably so. Yet that is how I feel. On the one hand Claire is here with us, and if she is then I want to keep hold of that. On the other hand Claire has gone, and I need to let go.
You see my problem?
I need to make a decision to let go of the old me and welcome the new me, soon.
A New Chapter By The Sea
A New Chapter By The Sea
We went down to our new house over the weekend to have a chat with the guy selling it. Nothing is definite yet as we haven’t exchanged contracts, but as far as we are able to tell everything is good and we should be moving there late August or early September.
The house is in a small village in West Dorset and is about 0.8 of a mile from the beach. Claire informed me that we had been to the beach a few years ago, but I must say that with my man memory I have no recollection, and so I decided that we’d walk to the beach on Saturday to see how far it was from our new house to be.
We set off walking from a house and just 20 minutes later Thea, Millie, Toby, Olivia, Tommy (O’s boyfriend), Evie and myself were on the beach.
I was overwhelmed with emotion, both good and bad at the same time. It felt great knowing that we would probably be living a short distance from such a fantastic beach which we can visit at any time but at the same time it was so sad knowing that this was Claire’s dream, and she came so close to realising it herself.
Claire desperately wanted to live by the sea and we often spoke about when we eventually would. She saw our new house about a week before she died, so at least she died knowing that she would be moving to the coast fairly soon. It just makes me sad to think that she never actually made it.
Losing Claire has changed me so much. I can’t put my finger on what it is exactly and the only way I can describe it is as a “bollocks, I’m doing it” attitude! Facing mortality and death like this is bound to change our beliefs and values in our own life – and I think this is where the problem lay for people that don’t deal with their grief. The shift in our thinking changes so much that it becomes difficult to cope with.
Facing these issues head-on has become really important to me, I know that it would be easy to store up many negative emotions because it’s so difficult to deal with all of this change in thinking which has happened so fast. All that I know is that this is a process which happens slowly over time, each day we deal with a different issue and we move on. How long the process will take I have no idea and in fact I’m not going to focus on that at all. The problem is that we have no way of knowing that the process is finished and so why even bother asking ourselves the question, ‘is it finished yet?’.
If I’m working with a client as a coach that wants to be more confident or happy I will always ask them ” How you know that you are as confident or happy as you want to be, what will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – using this same logic on my own grief leads me to ask the question “How will you know that the grieving process has finished? What will you see, hear and feel specifically?” – unless I can answer that question with absolute clarity there is no point in me wondering how long will this will take because without clarity around that question I could end up feeling low for ever.
Moving house won’t sort all of this out I know that. But we started the process together as a couple, we were about to begin a new chapter in our lives and I’m looking forward to beginning a new chapter albeit in a rather different way to how I originally expected.
Moving on and Grieving seem at odds
Moving on and Grieving seem at odds
I’ve not posted for a few days as we went down to Devon to spend some time with my sister and her family – thanks guys for having us – I must say I missed the therapy that writing this blog brings!
It was tough at the sea, being there without my Claire didn’t seem right. When ever we went we used to make a point of walking on the beach, hand in hand, often in the evening and talking about how nice it would be to live there – all a bit surreal.
We’re settling in to some new routines which, to be honest, doesn’t feel right. It feels as though we are re-writing our lives without someone who should be here.
On the one hand we need to move on and develop new routines, and on the other hand we need to… to…. to… I’m not sure sure what the words are. To respect, to grieve – yes that’s the one – ‘grieving’ and ‘moving on’ seem at odds.
So what is the highest positive intention of grieving for me? Protection>love>peace>amazing joy.
And what is the highest positive intention of moving on me? Surviving>belonging>peace>amazing joy.
So actually, grieving and moving on have the same highest positive intention for me of ‘amazing joy’ – so I wonder if I could allow all the resources that are available to the part of me that wants to grieve, to share those resources with the part of me that wants to move on. Perhaps they could share those resources in synergy and harmony, working together for the same highest positive intention of allowing me to have ‘amazing joy’.
Moving on and grieving have the same intention, so I can do both.
It’s OK to move on. It’s OK to grieve. Their purpose is amazing joy.
I can live with that!