Dream A Little Dream

Here is something to think about ~

You have to speak

 

Your dream out loud.

 

               ~ Kelly Corrigan

To me the importance of this beautiful powerful thought is that when you speak your dream out loud, you start to make it real.  It's the first step in owning your dream and part of owning it is making the dream and all of its possibilities yours so that it can become real. 

 

By talking about your dream out loud, you give your dream a place in your life and it becomes a real part of your life, instead of just a passing thought that sometimes you think about but then it goes away and you continue on and put your energy into other things.

 

One of my dreams for 2014 is to upgrade my kitchen and I think I have finally saved enough money to start this exciting project!

 

 

Everyone has a dream.  It can be big or small; anything that you want it to be.

 

What's yours?

Falling Can Make You Stronger

One of my sisters sent me the video posted below that's about Moms and the endless, loving support they give their children.  In the case of this video, it shows Moms and their budding athletes in the beginning stages of learning their sports skills and then the years of repetition, the daily practice, practice, practice performed by the children until they reach the ultimate competition of the Olympics.

It's a wonderful video, tracing the path of infants and babies falling, getting back up, trying again and again, finally learning to ice skate, snowboard and ski so that they may perform more accomplished routines.

 

 

On another level, the video is also about raw persistence, resilience, determination and the commitment to never give up on your passions and your dream no matter what you decide to pursue in life.

Emotional resilience doesn't come to you just like that.  Unfortunately, you don't wake up one morning and suddenly you are resilient.  But don't be discouraged.  Resilience is the ability to become strong, healthy, bounce back or rebuild again after a loss, or a personal crisis.  The good news is resilience is something that can be developed within you.

 

You can gain strength through pain.  And little by little I bet you are doing it every day and you may not realize it.  Always get back up.  You can do it!

 

Here's the "Thanks Mom" video:

 

 

No Lifeguard On Duty

If you had told me ten years ago that it would take me this long to navigate my conflicting feelings of loss and truly come to grips with the fact that my husband died, he's not coming back and I'll never see him again, I would have thought you were smoking something and totally out there.

In the beginning, I was just trying to survive which meant working a full-time job and raising a thirteen-year-old boy by myself.  I honestly didn't think beyond the day I was in.  That's all I could manage.  I constantly told myself that other women have done it with more children and younger children and I could do it too.  But still it took all of the energy I could muster.

  

Photo By Sheila Hayes

Day by day, slowly, I put one foot in front of the other, sometimes falling, sometimes crashing, but always finding a way to get back up and put myself out there again.  There were times when I felt  as though I were swimming without a lifeguard on duty.  That I was screaming "Help" as loud as possible and no one heard me.  No one was there to jump in and save me if you know what I mean. 

 

And so I find that in between the making of daily decisions about working, taking care of the house, the car, and all of the other pressing responsibilities of motherhood and adulthood, somehow ten years happened.  Ten years of soul searching.  Ten years of living fully to the max. 

What did I learn?

         -- No one is going to do it for you.  You are allowed to wallow in the unknowns and unfairness of your situation for a short amount of time but then you have to stop.  As the saying goes, there comes a point where you have to pull up your big girl pants, take a deep breath and just go out there and live.  As screwed up as you feel, you just have to keep going and trust in yourself.  You are responsible for yourself and you will find your way to recover.  You will!

         -- Don't have regrets.  If it's not worth your energy, then push it aside and move on.  But if you have something to say to someone, then say it.  I'm not suggesting that you be mean or abrupt but if you have a point to make or a compliment to give then do it.  Don't wait around for a reason to do something.  You can't be afraid to try something new.  You are already living in uncharted territory.  You can make it happen.

         -- Nothing happens the way you think it will.  I don't know why it happens that way but it does.  That can be a good thing and it can also be an incredibly frustrating thing.  I worked on shifting my perspective about certain parts of my life and then sometimes ended up being pleasantly surprised.

         -- You have to take care of yourself; physically and mentally.  You need to get lots of sleep, eat well and definitely, definitely exercise.  Exercise is my saving grace.  On many days when I felt like everything was melting down I forced myself to get on the stationary bicycle, go outside and run or take a walk.  Sometimes I would walk with a friend and other times I would put the trusty ear buds in my ears, turn up the music, and try to work through some of my feelings that made me think I was constantly screwing up and that life was a mess.

           -- Reach out.  Definitely reach out.  Yes, your family and friends are more than uncomfortable with what has happened to you but you just have to keep talking and hoping that you can help them see what it feels like.  Strengthen your emotional support system.  Find a support group or volunteer to help a cause you are passionate about.  I think you will find it hard to make good solid progress if you try to push your feelings down inside yourself.  They will not go away on their own.  I know you think that you can ignore the chaotic emotional mess that's churning around inside of you but guess what?  You have to push through to the other side of the pain.

Ten years of hard work later, I feel I am in a better place and I have made huge strides in rebuilding my life.  I am writing this today in the hopes that I can lend a helping hand to others who are also on a journey to heal their hearts.  Cry, Laugh, Heal is here to let you know you are not alone in the emotions surrounding the loss of a loved one.

 

Perhaps more than anything, even as everything hits the fan, I have learned to try and stay positive and hopeful, to keep my heart open to all kinds of love and good times and the wonders of living a full life. 

 

Our loved ones would want us to find happiness without them and even though life doesn't feel the same, there is always, always the possibility for a different kind of life.  It may not be a life you had initially thought of for yourself but you are talented and special and deserve to find joy and inner peace . . .  and maybe even fall in love again.

Anything is possible!!!

Needing Sleep

Lots of great things happen to you while you are asleep.

 

Your skin repairs itself, your mind relaxes and resets itself and your body strengthens its immune system and reduces levels of stress.

But you have to do it to reap the benefits.

 

These days people like to brag about how little sleep they need.  I remember reading somewhere that Martha Stewart only sleeps four hours a night.  I thought to myself, "You've got to be kidding!  I could never last very long if I only got four hours of sleep a night!"

Even Charlie Brown & Lucy Need To Sleep

One of the key elements of a healthy life and healthy grieving is allowing your emotions to surface in order to work through them.  You can put off dealing with your emotions but sooner or later they will come back at you, even stronger than before.  Unfortunately, you have to come face-to-face with your pain.  Oherwise you block the grieving process.  If you continue to ignore these emotions, then you end up holding them inside yourself and eventually you will affect your ability to sleep and other areas of your life.

 

Do you feel tired all the time?  Part of grieving is feeling fatigued.  I was exhausted after my husband's death and I found that dealing with my husband's death made my sleeping patterns change in a way that had never happened before.  After working all day, I would fall asleep sometime around 7:30 pm or 8 pm and then sleep until 4am.  On the weekends, I would fall alseep during the day.  This went on for a number of months and then my sleeping pattern finally changed again.  It felt weird but it was okay. 

 

Even if you can't sleep because you are upset or anxious about a loved one's death, I also found you can sometimes sit still and breathe quietly and find a focal point in which to loose yourself.  It might not work the first few times you try this but it is worth the effort.

 

Sleep is critical to our well-being and resting your body will help your emotional recovery.

 

Listen to this great TED talk that Arianna Huffington gave on the value of getting a good night's rest and how sleep is essential to our creativity and recovery.  She makes some great points!

 

  

Now Is Powerful

Photo By Patti Raab

When I was in my twenties, I felt as though I had all the time in the world to do whatever it was I wanted to do.  I think that feeling was the luxury of youth.  I had no sense of needing to get things done urgently because if it didn't happen today I was confident that I would get another chance tomorrow.  There would always be tomorrow for a do-over, if you will.

"See you tomorrow!"

"Oh, I'll tell you about that later."

"Yeah we have to find a date and then we'll do it.  I'll get back to you."

But now I try very hard to stay in the present, to appreciate the gift of life, and say and do what should be taken care of today because nine years ago today my wonderful husband died and I saw that you don't always get a tomorrow.

I saw how quickly life can twirl you around and yank off your blindfold, leaving you stumbling, confused and guessing about the scary unknown.

How did I keep it together (some of the time), raise a child and work a full-time job?

By taking baby steps in the beginning and slowly developing a well of inner strength that came through the kind help of family, friends, neighbors, praying a lot, meditating a lot, crying, laughing, reaching out for help from a fantastic support group, learning to make peace, accepting some of the bad stuff and writing for Cry, Laugh, Heal.

 

You, my dear readers, are truly a gift I never thought I would have and I thank you, thank you for coming to Cry, Laugh Heal!

 

Being in present time, to be what is called "fully present" sounds cliche but it really isn't.  I have found that when I concentrate on staying in the present it is truly a good thing.  I don't always succeed but the results are definitely worth the effort.

 

For me, staying in the present means I am with the person that I am with.  I am listening to them and the words they are saying to me, the thoughts and emotions they are trying to convey to me. 

 

I am not typing on my computer keyboard as they are talking to me, I am not watching television as they talk to me and I am not writing a check or a note as they try to talk to me.  I am focused on our conversation and I am really, really trying not to think ahead about my reply.

 

I am mentally focused in the moment of what is happening between me and the other person.

 

I am trying not to let my mind run ahead or go backwards in time because then I might miss the beauty of what is happening to me right now.

 

Now is a beautiful thing and a thing to take care of. 

 

Now is when you get to say and do what you intend to do so that later on you don't have regrets about how you forgot to say something or you should have done something.

 

Now is powerful.

 

Whatever it is, do it today.  Don't put it off.  Do it now.

 

It's Not What You Think

  

 

 

 

To show you how little I knew about loss, I thought that the first year after my husband's death was going to be the hardest time that I would ever have to experience.  My thinking was something along the lines of  "If I can get the first year under my belt, then each year after that will become easier to handle."  Right?

Guess what? Not. Always. True.

Grief is always full of surprises and just when you think you have it under control, you don't.

The first year was so raw with emotion for me and such a blur of just getting through the 365 days of it, that the whole idea of my husband's death, the finality of it, didn't really and truly sink in at all. I thought about it, cried about it, read about it and even went to a support group for it but it still was a concept that danced all over the place and didn't settle in.

But the second year was different.  For me, the second year was harder than the first because it painfully confirmed for me over and over again that he wasn't coming back.  Ever.  That this was it and it's not like he's gone on a very long trip.  And then the second year also forced me to stop playing all those mind games with myself and face up to my new life. 

But what happened to me may not happen to you.

I know it sounds like a cliche, but it's still so true: everyone has their own grief journey to travel and no two journeys are the same.  There is no right way or wrong way to grieve.  There is only your way.

I'm not making this up.  It's really true.  Your reactions and experience with grief may be very different from mine and it's totally okay and normal.  It's normal because our relationships are different, our experiences are different, our emotional DNA is different, our religious beliefs are different and our expectations from life and the person we lost are different.

Unfortunately, no one prepares us for those differences. We may watch someone we know experience grief and we think that person's experience will be ours too.  But that isn't always the case.  I lost a husband.  Someone else may have tragically experienced the death of a child or a wife or a friend or a parent.

As much as we may want one and search for one, life does not provide us with a guide book on how we should grieve.  We all process pain and loss differently. 

We grieve because we love.  It is because we love that we grieve.  We care and we emotionally connect to other people and when that person is taken away, it is a shock that can take a long time to process.  On the surface, you are handling things, you take care of daily responsibilities and you go through life automatically.

 

But underneath, you may be a mess.

By the third and fourth year of grief, you think it's going to be so much better and sometimes it is.  I have two friends, they live in completely different cities, they don't know each other, they are different ages and both have lost spouses.  The woman has children and grandchildren and lost her husband suddenly in a tragic car accident.  The man has no children and nursed his wife through a lengthy illness until she died.

 

Both have told me they are surprised by the fact that they continue to grieve during their fourth year of loss.  They are active, positive people trying to change and rebuild their lives because both of them socialize, take classes and work.  They meet a lot of people but nothing has ever clicked.

So they forge forward, as I and others do, together, trusting that time will heal us as we journey to renewal and new opportunities.

It's what we know and we keep doing it until it gets better. 

 

 

There Is A Season (Turn, Turn,Turn)

"Turn! Turn! Turn!," a classic pop song performed by the Byrds in the 1960's, has been playing in my mind recently.  The music was written by Pete Seeger and the lyrics were adapted from the Book of Ecclesiastes.

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)

There is a season (Turn, Turn, Turn)

And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

Maybe it's the change in seasons dovetailing with graduations, weddings, engagements and milestone birthdays, but it feels as though the times, they are a changin'.

A time to be born, a time to die,

A time to plant, a time to reap

A time to kill, a time to heal

A time to laugh, a time time to weep

My relatives and friends are transitioning into new chapters in their lives and it's exciting to watch as the occasions are marked with "pomp and circumstance," rings and vows and lots and lots of birthday candles.

To Everything (Turn, Turn, Turn)

There is a season (Turn, Turn,Turn)

And a time to every purpose, under Heaven

These events also remind me that life doesn't wait for you to get yourself together.  Whether you're ready or not, it's going to "keep on keeping on" and that's just the way that it is.

 

As a friend of my husband's used to say, "Life is not a dress rehearsal.  It's the real deal baby."

 

There are going to be many times when you need to take a break from the daily rush of life's activities after you have lost a loved one.  You'll need that break to evaluate what's happened, and slowly rebuild something new for yourself.  There may be many people who are uncomfortable with your grieving and want you to "get back to normal."

 

But guess what? 

 

There is no "normal" and you're not on anyone else's schedule.  No matter where you are in the process, you'll find that life is still out there waiting for you to jump back in and join it again.

A time to build up, a time to break down

A time to dance, a time to mourn

A time to cast away stones, a time to gather stones together

You will always have your memories.  No one can change those for you.  It is important to hold onto them but not in an obsessive way.  Sadness may still exist for you, but with time you will gain more control over your emotions and become more confident about which way to go.

To Everything (Turn,Turn, Turn)

There is a season (Turn, Turn,Turn)

And a time to every purpose, under Heaven