The better question would be… what do we grieve?
Do you know what you have allowed yourself to grieve over your lifetime?
We associate grief with death.
In actuality through our lifetime we go through many types of loss that go unprocessed.
Sickness, divorce, breakups, leaving one’s country, losing pets, losing jobs, losing friendships etc are all a type of loss.
Grief is grief and has to be processed the same way.
I found out that I had lots of griefs I had not processed through my lifetime.
I just swallowed it.
After Robbie died I knew I needed help to process the grief I felt.
Why had I not felt so devastated before?
When my dad died 20 years ago…I remember swallowing my grief.
When I was 18 my boyfriend Philip died in a tragic motorcycle accident in another continent…I remember swallowing my grief.
We are supposed to be strong…it happened for the best…he is in a better place…his suffering is over blah blah blah are all the cliches we use ourselves and we hear from others trying to ‘comfort’ us.
That’s why we swallow our grief because we are supposed to be ‘strong’.
Ignoring our grief is supposed to make us ‘strong’.
I found out all those cliches do NOTHING to the person who just lost a loved one.
These are just senseless words we use to deal with an awkward moment.
Losing some one is the ONE time we DON’T have to be strong.
A hug and ‘I’m sorry’ works much better.
With Robbie I was involved with his illness…and then he died…there was no more room left in me to swallow my grief.
I joined a Grief Recovery Group to help me deal with these feelings that I had no place to shove.
The five stages of grief are:
denial.
anger.
bargaining.
depression.
acceptance.
We have all heard about them.
They exist…but not in the way we think.
We don’t go through them in that order.
There is no order…they is no sequence…there is no process…there are no rules to follow with grieving a loved one.
And…we ALL grieve uniquely.
With every painful thought we have…we have ALL those stages.
I wasn’t present the day Robbie died.
I left the country on a planned trip and he died the next day.
I had to go through all those stages of grief of ‘why I wasn’t present’ to get to an acceptable answer…to get to the acceptance stage.
The only acceptable answer to me was that this was his parting gift to me…he was sparing me that memory.
That was my acceptance stage of that thought.
It was a process of getting to the acceptance stage of a lot of thoughts.
There are still many thoughts to process.
In our Grief Recovery Group we were made to write down a flow chart of our entire life with our lost one and we got a chance to share out story in the group…the good, the bad, the ugly and the sad…without interruptions or feedback.
The ONLY thing that helps with grief…is having someone to listen to our feelings…uninterrupted.
In Loving Memory of Robbie.
I miss my friend everyday.
Always loved.
Died too young.
I hope the view is just as spectacular from up above.
♥️♥️♥️
