I watched an interview online the other day and the speaker was asked to define grief. She said grief is anytime that you need to let go. I thought that was a really simple but absolutely profound answer. Letting go is hard because we attach ourselves to something and it becomes a part of us. Something has to change for us to move on and when we resist the change we feel the pain and we suffer. Grief is there to help us to let go.
When Blaine was sick I did not realize I was grieving. I knew I had great emotion. I was afraid of what would happen, I was frustrated with everything and I was desperate for answers. Things had changed and the man I knew was feeling all kinds of emotions as well. He wasn’t joking around like he used to. He wasn’t feeling well enough to go out or visit with friends or family. Even though eating was his joy he was not interested in food. He was not himself. Our lives had flipped upside down and we thought if we could just find a solution, a cure, a way to get past the illness that we could again be living the life we had. The life we were most comfortable with was gone and I was in grief.
Life is constantly changing and sometimes we go with the flow and sometimes we resist. We don’t think about it as grief that a young mother feels when her baby starts school on the first day but essentially that is what it is. That empty nest feeling when your baby starts off to college or university, also grief. When you have to move to a new home, you grieve for the old home and our friends. When you retire it is the same. We have to let go of the old to let in the new. It has changed. It is normal to grieve when you have to let go of these things. We must let go to move on. There is no choice if we want to move forward.
So how is losing a spouse or a loved one different? Well first of all we feel that death is very final. At least when our child is off to grade school or college we know at the end of the day they will return and we are excited for their future because we have been dreaming about it all along. When we retire we make all these plans of what we will do and we start to look forward to the future we have been imagining. We have been thinking about these things for a while and we are readying ourselves to let go and try new things. When someone dies we don’t look forward to the future because we don’t want to. The physical form as we knew it is gone. They are no longer here like they used to be and we feel like a part of us went with them because we were joined together. For example, I was Blaine’s wife. We had our friends, our life, our dreams. Who am I now? I want to go back to the way things were. That is painful. It is the resistance to the concept that now I am someone else living a very different life that brings all the pain and the suffering. We grieve not only for what we will miss in the past but also for what we will miss in the future without them. We had plans and those have changed. We think about the past or the future and it triggers our emotions. This is how it happens for me.
I think that in order to heal we must entertain the idea of letting go. It is a process. You have to actually sit with your pain and acknowledge it is there. We cannot do it all at once. As I grieve, I let a little bit go at a time. When I get triggered by some event or topic of discussion I do what I can, when I can, to let those painful emotions come up and run through me. I do my best not to resist them. I try to let them go. I can start a journal and let them go by writing, I can take a walk, I can cry, I can listen to music and there are many other ways. After I do that, I can start to imagine what I want my future to look like. I start to build something new. We start to look fondly at the past. We are grateful for the memories. This is healing from grief. This is what allows us to move forward. It is not easy but it is the way forward.
There are 35+ years worth the memories that Blaine and I share. The bond that we have is strong and still exists. I will learn to connect with him in a different way. I am purposely letting go of what I cannot change. Sometimes I resist and it hurts. It’s okay. I am patient with myself. I do know that when I let these things go I am making room to do something that excites me, that gives me the space to be able to discover who I am and what I now want to be in this world. It makes room for excitement, passion and joy. I know that Blaine is right here with me, helping me let go. He is so delighted to be a part of my new journey, whatever that might be.
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