Time for the grief to go

I made a conscious intention a couple of days ago to let go of my grief.

There has been so much over the last 3 years, culminating in my mom’s death in December.  When we suffer profound loss, we tend to revisit it for a period of time afterwards.  Sometimes, for the rest of our lives.

I started wondering why?  Why do I keep bringing back these feelings of pain and sadness, not only in my mind, but in my body.  I can feel the pain as if it were happening all over again.  It’s like picking at a wound that has scabbed over, only to make it bleed again and again and again.

How can it heal, when it is re-opened?

I realized that part of it was guilt. Guilt that if I don’t keep thinking about these deaths, that I’m not properly honoring them.  A belief that I need to remind myself of their loss and their absence on this physical plane.  That I can’t talk to them or hug them or apologize or encourage.  And I feel guilty that their absence also gives me a certain freedom. Especially from parental and family expectations and obligations.

Another part was fear. Fear that if I don’t revisit and remember, that they will fade from my memory as if they were never here.  Fear that I will forget how profoundly they affected me and how fiercely I loved them and they loved me.  Especially with the dogs, since I have other dogs now.  It becomes difficult to keep the dead ones in my consciousness; they all start to meld together.

So, I’ve been picking the scab; often in the quiet of  middle of the night.  I would wake up and remember.  They are gone.  Then move on to the day they died and the circumstances of their deaths and then I felt it all over again.  Almost as if it were happening in that moment.  And it felt terrible, but I rationalized it by telling myself that I have to keep their memory alive.  I have to feel that pain.

No more.  That scab has to heal. No more picking.  No more bleeding.  It will most certainly leave a scar.  But, scars don’t bleed and we often display them with the stories of how we got them. Usually, with a smile because we know that we survived and no matter how awful the wound, we did heal to a certain extent.  We healed enough to tell the tale of that scar.

I’ve shifted over to positive memories.  Funny, joyful, instructive, emotional, happy, silly and yes, sometimes sad or challenging memories.  A well-rounded remembrance of our lives.

So, that’s where I am.  Healing.  Isn’t that where we all are?  Everyday?  One wound may still be fresh, while others have scabbed over and many are well earned scars.  This is our life on planet earth. It hurts, but we get another day to make a life…and then another and another and another.

Allowing my grief to move into a new stage involved a release and an emptying that leaves me open and ready to what is coming.  It’s been a long process, with so many losses piled on top of one another in a fairly short time.  I’d never really had to deal with death in such an intimate way until 3 years ago and I was ill prepared.  A very steep learning curve that culminated in the honor of seeing, hearing and feeling my mom’s last breath.

But, it’s okay.  Lives end. They begin.  And what we do in between is what matters to humanity.  Make a decision to heal your wounds.  Ask for help, seek out tools and practices.  Don’t keep making yourself bleed over and over.  We have an innate ability to heal physically that is so apparent.  What may not be as apparent is our innate ability to heal our spirits as well.  The first step is intention.

I wish you well.  Feel free to reach out.

Who’s stealing the photos?

I just spent a few days with my 94 year-old mother. She has a very nice apartment in a beautiful assisted living facility about 4 hours south of where I live. We’re coming up on the first anniversary of my dad’s death and she is still very sad and very lonely, so my siblings and I do our best to ease her burdens.

For the past couple of months, my mom has been obsessive about her photo albums. She keeps telling us that someone is taking her pictures.

I’ve had this discussion with her at least 20 times, as has my brother who lives about 15 minutes away and sees her several times a week. I always say that I don’t know what’s happening to her pictures and point out that she still has thousands of photos, spanning all of her life and even some from before she was born.

The truth is that over many decades, things get misplaced or we’ve removed a photo here and there for various  celebrations and photo compilations. Or maybe one of us just liked a photo and snagged it for our own memory. Who knows, but it’s a frustrating déjà vu every time I arrive, to be grilled as to “who is taking all of my pictures?”

This last trip, she sent me home with a little album of photos from my wedding. This was after she made me promise that I wouldn’t throw them ‘in the trash’. I assured her that I would not. I told her that they mean as much to me as they do to her. But, that wasn’t quite true.

It’s not true because I finally realized that her obsession with the photos isn’t about the photos. It’s about proof that her life was as full and happy as she believes that it was. These volumes of thousands of photos are what she has left of her life. They are photographic evidence that she and my dad had 70+ years of love and happiness and family.

Having spent a fair amount of time around elderly folks over the past few years, I have seen how their lives shrink as their mobility and abilities shrink. At this point, my mom’s life takes place in a two bedroom apartment. The things in that apartment are of paramount importance to her. She is surrounded by what is familiar and that is her only comfort.

The photos are part of that. They represent the time when her world was big and full and juicy. Photos of parents, children, grandchildren, siblings, friends, family, houses, cars, many, many trips and vacations. Photos of people who are long dead and photos of grandchildren, who now have their own children. She looks through the albums and admits to me that she can’t remember many of the names that go with the hundreds of faces. She often can’t remember ‘which kid belonged to which other kid’.

But, she knows that these people were in her life at some point in the past 94 years. She sees photos of my smiling and handsome Dad and is assured that they were happy and loving and that he really was by her side, as her partner, for 72 years.

We all need this reassurance. That we matter. That we loved and were loved. That we’re here for a reason and that when we’re gone, someone will remember.

Dear Future: Leave me alone…

 

I was recently cruising at 30,000 feet on my way to Traverse City where we hope to eventually start the next phase of our life and I jotted down some of my thoughts as I headed to our new farm house.  Stream of consciousness; no editing.  I learn more that way….

While talking to a neighbor the other day, she asked me if I ever regretted building the house in Fraser and without one second’s hesitation, I told her no.  How many people can live in such a beautiful place just a few miles from a fabulous ski resort?

In a place where moose roam the neighborhood and the summers are full of glorious sunshine and wild flowers.

It’s a place where people look out for each other, due to the sparse population and the difficult terrain and weather.  I’m so grateful for where we live and for the past 13 years in Colorado.

As I rode the airport shuttle up and over the pass answering questions about our magical home from the visitors sharing the van, I had such a pang of sadness.  How do you leave such a place?

Why do you leave such a place?  My fantasy of living in northern Michigan is still just that; a fantasy.  I’m on my way to a home and homestead that I don’t know.  I’ve spent much more time there emotionally than physically, so I guess the next 10 days will be a step toward confirming or moderating that fantasy.

I’ve already mentally moved in and yet, I barely know how to get there or where the property lines are.  What is going on?

I have a tendency to live in the future; whether it’s my restless mind that can’t wait until my 20 minute meditation is up or my visualization of a future that features a new home 1500 miles away.  I have no idea why I do that and I’ve fought mightily not to, but  I suppose there is some comfort in believing I have a future to look forward to.

Some call it ‘wishing your life away’ and maybe that’s why I have found that my memories of the past 20 or 30 years are so opaque.  They almost seem like they are the memories of another person.  Was that really me?

Is it because in the midst of living today, I’m constantly projecting forward?  How do you imprint memories if you aren’t fully ‘there’, living them?

So, here I am flying toward what I envision as my future, yet I’m feeling some pangs of something.  Regret? Sadness?  I don’t live in the past, but it dawns on me that in terms of days, months and years, my past outweighs my future and that imbalance between past and future will only continue to grow.

So, the question is:  do I need to choose my next move carefully or with reckless abandon?

I’m a thinker and a planner and yet I’m flying toward a second home that I spent less than an hour touring before I bought it.  My reptilian mind or my inner compulsive teenager took over for a reason, so there must be a lesson here.

I’ll be keeping my eyes wide open for the next 10 days.