Monkey Bars

Yesterday I wrote about one small aspect of holding on to a deceased loved one's material things for a long time.  It's a rather large emotional minefield of an issue but if you ride along with me for a bit more today maybe we can make some progress together and get on with it.

 

Let's be real:  nobody wants to hurt and nobody wants to feel pain.  It's in our DNA to try and protect ourselves and so we naturally want to run away from pain and suffering; even sometimes to deny its existence.  I think this is one of the main reasons why painful issues hang around for so long and aren't resolved quickly.  They just plain hurt.

Unfortunately, I know this for sure:  you are only delaying the inevitable.  At some point, you're going to have to feel the hurt and pain to get to the other side which actually can be very freeing.  This time around for me, it was a jar of Ovaltine, but it could be anything the next time: a possession, a feeling, a person or even a situation.

I think it's almost similiar to that feeling you may have had as a child while working your way across the metal monkey bars on the school playground.  You notice I said metal.  I'm old enough that those playground structures like monkey bars were made of metal so when you put your hands on them they were either blistering cold in the winter or burning hot in the summer.

 

 

While hanging from the bars and trying to swing my body back and forth, I knew I was in safe territory as I slowly but surely moved forward to the other side.  It was familiar and all I wanted to do was reach the other side and let go.  And then there were those times when I would miscalculate and I would get tired and be hanging somewhere in the middle.  "Oh no," I would think, "I'm almost over to the other side.  I don't want to drop and fall to the ground."  The ground seemed so far away and I didn't want to release my hands from the bars as much as my arms and hands might hurt.  I wanted to stay on the bars.

 

It's the same with being hooked on a comforting feeling that a possession, a person or a situation can give you.  You've convinced yourself that everything will be okay if you have that possession, person or are in that set of circumstances.  It helps you ride through the pain, at least for awhile. 

 

For me, pieces of paper with my husband's writing on it were comforting.  It didn't matter what he had written.  It was just the quick glance at his distinctive handwriting that would make me feel better, as though he had just handed them to me.  I would fold them and put them in my purse, pin them on the bulletin board behind my computer at home and generally just leave them lying around. 

 

Then one day, and I would say it took about a year for me to feel this way, I started to actually read the papers and really look at them and I realized that keeping all these papers was getting to be messy; that keeping one or two significant handwritten notes was enough and I could toss the rest in the trash.  The papers were getting in the way of moving forward.

 

The process of learning to let go happens at a different pace for all of us.  Sometimes we move quickly through anger or frustration and slowly through anxiety or it can be the other way around for another person.  We are all different in our ways of handling and expressing grief.

 

Just as we work our way across the monkey bars one by one, we work our way slowly but surely through the grief process, step by step, beginning to heal and feeling oh so much stronger as we reach the other side.

Moving Day

I received a couple of texts over the weekend from a friend who lives in another city about how he now lives in a new place.

 

I didn't know he had moved from his home of almost 20 years so I was surprised by his news but I also knew that there was more to the story than just a regular heave-ho move from one place to another.

 

 

My friend lost his wife to cancer a number of years ago and she was a wonderful and talented person, but she also was the kind of person who kept everything.  She was not a hoarder but instead was a person who wanted to keep things so that she could pass these things along to other people because she knew that they would be perfect for someone else.  She kept all these things until she saw the person she had in mind or until she eventually got around to sending the item to the person.

 

This is why I knew that when my friend said he had just moved to a new apartment that it must have meant that he had come face to face with the dreaded day he had tried to put off for so long:  what to do with her possessions.

 

There are times when we all need to try and work through stuff by ourselves and then after a while of giving it our best shot, there comes a time when we need to talk to friends about what is going on.

 

And when what is going on is bad, I think the best thing to do is shut up and listen to the person who is going through a painful time. And listen. And listen some more until the person says they can't talk anymore and they have to get off the phone.

 

Which is what I did.

 

And I was happy to listen to him talk about the all of the tons of stuff he found and what he did with it.  I would go into more detail but this part is not my story to tell.

 

My part of the story is about the idea that even though you may not be in a crisis mode, it is always nice to have someone to reach out to.

 

To connect with someone else on a human level.  To be able to say this is what is happening to me and it sucks, big time!

 

To feel that another human being understands you and gets what you are going through.

 

To know that you are not alone.

 

And you never are either, my friends!!! Ever!!!!!

 

Forgiveness

Someone close to me is emotionally stuck on certain negative events that happened in her life decades ago.  She talks about them in great detail and tells others how she felt when these things happened to her.  Listening over and over again to her retelling of these events doesn't seem to help her move forward and get past what happened.

 

It's as though she has a list in her head and she mentally checks these things off every day to remind herself that someone did something wrong to her.  It is sad and frustrating to watch someone concentrate on the same past events and yet not be able to say good-bye to them.

 

Constantly being a part of this conversation is teaching me in a new way about being positive about life and truly forgiving.  Not just saying you're sorry or accepting someone else's apology because you are expected to, but really and truly getting it out of your system and meaning it.

 

 

 

 

Bad things, unfair things and nasty things do happen to us.  Unfortunately that's what happens in life.  But great things, positive things, happy things also happen to us.  It's up to us to either choose the negative or the positive and then go ahead and live our lives.

 

A friend explained it to me this way: if you decide to hold on to something that makes you angry or "wronged," then every day you have to find the negative energy within yourself to go over that event and how it felt and what you think should have happened instead of what did actually happen.

 

That's a lot of baggage to drag around.

 

Instead, forgiveness is something you practice once.  You look at what happened, realize we are all human and make mistakes, forgive and then let it go.  Really let it go.  And then move on.

 

A colleague at work has the following saying about forgiveness taped to her desk.  The author is unknown but every time I read it I stop and think about what it means and commit to bringing the spirit of forgiveness into my life.

Here's the saying:

"Forgiveness is a decision to let go of resentment and thoughts of revenge.

It is the act of untying yourself from thoughts and feelings that bind you to the offense committed against you.

When you embrace forgiveness, you embrace peace, hope, gratitude and joy."

Peace!

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.