Some Lessons from Grief…. maybe you know somebody going through it…chances are we all will at some stage..
10 years since losing my Flash, this is some of what I have learnt about Grief!
1. It doesn’t come with a tick off box!
2. Everybody ‘does it’ differently.
3. When you don’t know what to do for somebody who is grieving just ask them what they need, that is preferable to disappearing all together… or make them Banoffi Pie, that works.
4. Your length of grieving or showing people you are sad is in no way related to how much you loved and missed them. You still love and miss them when you are happy.
5. I don’t think it is time that heals grief, because some people never seem to be able to move through it. I think we GROW through our grief. We learn better skills to ride the wave of grief, and then we fall again and then we get better…
6. Often the grief is not about the person you lost (I mean Flash is probably having a lovely time… no more pain, Captain of the Rugby team (well it is played in heaven!), still able to watch and enjoy us, know we will all catch up again)…. it is what I am left with that perhaps is where some of my pain comes from… Doing Autism without him, my boys not having their Dad, missing his love and support, missing sex… feeling ripped off that I don’t have the love of my life here, watching how the change in your family dynamic changes your friendships…etc
7. You can still do grief wearing sequins.
8. Grief won’t drown or be numbed… People seem to want to medicate grief and sadness, sorry I don’t think that works… although I did try and drown it in wine and champagne on lots of occasions… that didn’t work either, you still felt the pain of grief with a hangover….
9. I relate to ‘wailing’ with grief and for the departed… I get that totally.
10. Many people are very uncomfortable with grief and sadness… that is not about you… it is probably about some grief in them that wasn’t given space or allowed to be looked at.
11. You are not being ‘negative’ when you are sad ….you are simply being sad!
12. You do not need to feel guilty about feeling happy when you are grieving…
13. People love to talk about living in the moment. Well guess what all you positive peeps, sometimes in that moment you are sad, sometimes devastated, sometimes happy, sometimes vulnerable, sometimes overwhelmed and sometimes ecstatic!
14. Although time doesn’t heal grief I do notice that as time goes on you are able to remember more of the good times and you can do it with a lighter, brighter kind of missing. It will the first thing you think about every day you wake up and every night before you go to sleep and then one day it will be the second thing… and so the healing starts.
15. You still have a right to your JOY during your grieving.
16. Sometimes we exasperate our grief by analysing death… death is inevitable, by talking about whether it is justified…. it has happened so now it just is, by over identifying with HOW it happened…. everybody has to die somehow, and everybody will keep dying somehow, it is the one sure thing, no getting out of it, can’t avoid it fact of life. And there is no set order in which people will die, yes some parents will out live their children, and that doesn’t mean it feels OK or is right or is how it should be, but the fact remains that is how it is. So when you are grieving be sad for the ‘loss’ but don’t get caught up in all of the other stuff… no amount of analysing, talking about, thinking about, writing about it will change it. And do you know I think I finally got this! Sigh….
