Author: Grief Blessings

I struggled with a title for today’s post, but couldn’t find one that wouldn’t have some level of discord to it. I don’t ever want to offend anyone, but what I do want to do is move people to think differently. Differently about grief. Differently about how you grieve. Differently about how you treat people who are grieving.

Recently I was discussing grief with a good friend and the conversation came to a place that I don’t think I have been able to convey verbally to anyone.  She explained to me that when your child dies a physical, spiritual and mental part of you dies too. And I can say that without a doubt she hit the nail on the head. The very concept is what I have had my biggest struggle with when it comes to communicating my pain to my family and friends.

So often we want our grieving loved ones to “get over it” or “move on” or better yet get back to your “old self”. So we grievers we try and try to “get over it” and to “move on” but you simply cannot. Life is not the same. It will never be the same. Everything you knew to be true is gone. Everything you hoped for has been destroyed. It’s as if you have been sucked up into a vacuum of nothingness. A vast cesspool of life.

So what do you do? You try and find some sense of it all and recreate who you are to be now. And I can tell you without a doubt for me, it has been the most difficult part of my journey. Finding out the new me. What my purpose is here on earth. Why I am here still I do not know.

I feel like life is passing by so very quickly and I keep looking for the open door to go through to my new life. Yet each door is locked. I reach out in faith to turn that doorknob and it simply doesn’t turn. My face flat against the door sobbing and crying out to God “which door” “what do you want from me” “why can’t I find the right door”?

I remember writing once “There is a fine line between the space I exist and the space I want to be.” That is how I see my life now. Existing in a space I don’t want to be, and unable to cross over to the space I need to be.

Until next time

m

Today…..I will Remember……Today…..I will cry…….Today……I will laugh…..Today is anniversary – the day my daughter died suddenly 3 years ago. Today….my heart breaks all over again.

I have laid out for you my thoughts on fear and how it relates to the grieving process; and how trust is a process that deals with fear head on. So now I will talk about the amount of faith it takes to trust. To trust every aspect of your life and on so many levels.

I know I’ve said before that my journey through the grieving process has been difficult at times. Epecially in the early months. Now as my journey as matured, so to speak, it has become more demanding of me. More so that in order for me to move forward in my grief I have to work through the process of trusting God. Trust Him to show me that the test of my faith will be the very thing that moves me forward.

I think the test of my faith has been that I have dealt with multiple devasting losses. So many I can’t even begin to lay out before you. You know about a few because I have discussed them here on this blog over the past 3 years. However, the losses you aren’t aware of are the losses that came to me early in my life.

Losses upon losses that brought me my knees when Brittany died. That required I trust something greater than me. Something more profound that anything I’ve ever known in my life. My faith. Knowing that God would bring me through. As I began to rely solely on his word for the first few months I began to realize that without the word and without God I didn’t stand a chance.

My bible became the soothing medicine that I needed to show me that there was hope in the midst of my grief.  Everyday I relied on the word to find passages and scriptures that would help me to see that even as bad as I felt, as broken-hearted I was, and as the loneliness gave way to bad thoughts, I would find hope.

Over the past couple of years I haven’t been as diligent in my bible reading as I was in those early days. To some degree I think that’s why I have began to struggle somewhat with the ability to move to the next level. Spending time with God thru the reading of His word has taken a back seat to the business of life. And that makes me proundly sad. Sad because I feel I have let myself down and I’ve let God down.

Reading the word gives me a lot of hope, but it also takes me places that make me uncomfortable. It makes me think about my life and where it has been and where it is going. Some days it’s just too much to think about. The loneliness that has prevailed since my daughter’s death has been staggering. So much so that it has begun to change me as a person. And I don’t like that. Loneliness can kill a person’s drive to stay healthy and to enjoy life.

My encouragement is that I know what works and I know what doesn’t. My challenge is that I have to work harder on what I know works. God. God works. So my dear friends if you’re struggling with grief, or you are struggling with life in general. Look to God. Look up. Thank God for who you are and where you are going – then, and only then, can He light the path for  you to walk, to run, to dance through life.

until next time

M

One of Erikson’s stages of psychosocial development is Trust vs Mistrust. It is the stage that infants are in until about 12 months of age. But I have often wondered if we, as adults, don’t battle this concept out in our lives when we are faced with trauma, or a loss or even coming in contact with the wrong people.

I have written about loss and fear these past few days and now I want to share a little bit about trust and how trust or the lack of trust keeps us from moving forward in our grief journey. Since I started the journey almost 3 years ago, I have struggled with the jump from fear to trust in about every aspect of my life. Fear has kept me from trusting on many levels.

One level is trusting that life will be ok. That I will survive this loss. That there is a reason I am left with this huge gaping hole in my heart. Life isn’t what I once knew to be good. For me life became a job to do or a task to finish. I lost all sense of trust in what I knew to be true.

Another level was trusting that I would ever be happy again. Whether it would be appropriate to be happy again. Trusting that in time the happiness I once had and the joy I once experienced would come back. That was a hard lesson to learn. Life as I knew it changed at 6:55 am October 13th 2006. I no longer trusted life, the medical profession, myself or anyone around me, but most of all I didn’t trust my faith in God.

What I have learned in these past 3 years is that the life I knew is gone and will never return. I had to create a new life, one that didn’t include Brittany, but did include the memory of her. I knew I wasn’t going to settle for forgetting her. I wasn’t going to stop talking about her or referencing an event about her just because it made other people uncomfortable. But how does one create a new life. Where do you begin?

You begin with learning to trust God. In the end that is all we got. If I didn’t have my faith, I couldn’t have seen the hope that exists today in my life. The hope that life can be made a new just as the day I let God take over my life. But as a person who has always taken the reigns and got things done, turning over my life and the healing process wasn’t going to be easy. And it has not.

But today I can say with all honesty that I am learning to trust. To trust that life can be and will be good again. To trust that I can let love back in my life, knowing that loving again and possibly losing someone is still better than living a life alone without love. I just can’t possibly think that life would be worth living unless there was love there. Love is a wonderful thing.

So trust my friends is the very key to moving forward. Trust is what makes us vulnerable to loss, but it also makes us keenly aware of the beauty that God has placed before us to enjoy. Live your life full of wide-eyed wonder and you’ll be guaranteed a life fully lived with love.

Until next time

M

I wrote yesterday about Mirror Mirror and how I put on a “face” for everyone to see. You might have wondered if this is working for me. And I’d tell you before this week it absolutely has. But now I must admit that it is not working for me now. I think I’m at a point that I’m ready to move onto the next thing in my life. Not letting people get close to me for fear of them seeing the weakness I feel when I grieve has been my biggest problem.

Somehow I have to find the ability to see the fear for what it is and embrace that fear head on. Fear has kept me from getting out and experiencing life. It has kept me from getting close to anyone, even my own family. Fear has kept me from dating. The fear of losing another person has paralyzed me into solitude. Thing is I hate solitude.

In the many years before Brittany died, I had the stereo on all the time. I loved music and loved to dance around while I cleaned house. Brittany and I used to dance around the house all the time. I would also complain about the TV being on so much. But now, the TV is my friend. It keeps me company. You see I hate the quiet. When it’s quiet my thoughts begin to take me to a place I’d rather not go. Fear begins to creep back in so I turn on the TV and shut out the fear. I bet you think “that’s not working for me either” and you are right.

I’m tired of the noise. The noise inside my head. I’m ready to get back to the person I was. Crazy funny girl who loves music and loves people. Where did she go? I buried her the day my daughter died. Seriously, how could I begin to have fun again? How does one begin to see joy again? Simple, yet so very hard to see – my faith in God has brought me this far my friends. If it weren’t for my faith, I would not be here today.

The fear – need to keep asking God to take it away – help me peel back the layers of fear and see that I do need love in my life. To bring back the color that left October 13, 2006. I have lived in a black & white world for 3 years now and it’s time to add a little color back in. The first step is the embrace fear. To see it for what it is…a stumbling block to healing.

Tomorrow I will write about trust and how trust and fear go hand in hand.

Until next time,

M

For sometime now I have been living the life of two people. Since Brittany died I found myself in the familiar territory of grief, but the unfamiliar territory of having a reason to keep living. To have a purpose. You see when my mother died I was 7 months pregnant with Brittany. So her impending birth kept me busy, so busy that I avoided the grieving process for about five years. Save that topic for another day.

The grieving process may be identified as the same according to many sources, but for me these were two totally different experiences. Even when my grandmother died five years after my mom, I felt I dealt with it as best I could. I was busy with a newly diagnosed epileptic daughter and she needed my full attention. I was also in nursing school at the time. So my plate was pretty full. No time for grieving.

So you can see that I do have some experience in the grief department. But nothing really prepares you to lose a child. I think mostly because it is so out-of-order of what should be a natural life process. A child, no matter the age, should never go before their parents. But it happens so much more than you would think. But that’s one of the biggest problems – we just don’t want to think about it.

I found for the most part that my family and friends just couldn’t deal with my grief. There were a few core people who, even if they didn’t understand, they knew to just be there.  As the months waned on and people began to go back to their “normal” lives, I was left with the most profound emptiness one could ever imagine. That is where I began to play “Mirror Mirror”.

Mirror Mirror is what I call the game a griever plays when they put on the mask everyone wants to see and hides the mask no one wants to see. Everyday that I left my house I put on that masked and pretended all was fine. I was fine. I mean really I was laughing and having fun – or so it would appear. Then I would barely make it home to crawl in my house and find my bible and begin to read passages in hopes of finding some small shred of hope that I was going to survive this loss.

This went on for quite some time. Throughout the process the financial hardship I faced from the medical bills that piled up during her treatment and that trailed in after her death. Many people came to my rescue and helped me with so many things. But it was the one thing, you know that one thing – that no one could help me with – the fact that my only child, the love of my life, the reason I lived and breathed was gone.

I became very good at pretending I was doing ok. But at the end of the day I would look in the mirror and the fear of the future, the fear of losing my memories of her, the fear of living began to paralyze my life. I could barely breathe.  There is a lot of fear that comes while grieving the loss of someone you loved beyond life itself.  You becomes really good at hiding it all. Because no one really wants to see it. No one wants to be reminded that this too could happen to them.

Until next time,

m

Yesterday I had the opportunity to see the movie “Love Happens”. I had known from previous trailers that this movie was about a man suffering grief from the loss of his wife. Realizing that watching a movie like this at this time of year may have not been one of my better ideas I went anyway. What I didn’t understand that there was a lesson I would walk away with.

In the movie this man has written a book about his experience after losing his wife suddenly in a car accident. During a large part of the movie he is out on the book circuit promoting his book and providing seminars for those attending who are going through the grieving process. For those of you who know me well, know that I too am writing a book. Although I don’t have a PhD, I am an RN which means I have seen a lot of grief. I have seen it also first hand in myown life. I don’t have any intention on doing seminars or going out on a book circuit, but I do think that going out and talking to people about grief is in my future.

Without spoiling the ending for anyone, I will just say that I would encourage anyone to see this movie who has been involved with a person who is grieving. Because I believe it will serve as a means for you to understand that everyone grieves differently and at different levels. So often we tend to have a preconceived idea of how someone should grieve. I think that most of that misconception comes from what will make us feel better because grief is uncomfortable. It’s not fun and it certainly is a process most want to avoid no matter what the circumstances are.

I know from my own experiences it’s a two-sided story. From one aspect it’s a personal journey that evolves. Death brings us to places where we find it uncomfortable. It makes us uneasy. It makes us look at our own mortality. It makes us face our own beliefs in the unknown. It makes us question why. And if you are a believer – you may even question God.

I know I have and still do question God as to why I lost my mother while being 7 months pregnant with Brittany. Losing my grandmother 5 years later. And then the worst loss of all, the sudden death of my 17-year-old daughter Brittany. I can’t possibly begin to tell you that God has answered my questions. He has not. But what He has provided is along my journey some very special people who I would have never met, who I would have never known the largeness of their hearts and their generosity and love for me and for God.

What I also know is that there are things I have yet to deal with. In the movie it becomes clear that this man is living two lives. The life of a griever that is public, the one we all want you to see. And then the life of a griever that is private. The one we don’t want you to see. The one that makes us vulnerable. It makes us retreat from public life because we don’t want anyone to know how we truly feel.

Over the next week I’m going to tell you my private thoughts on my own experience and what I learned in watching this movie. I do it not because it will help me, I know it will. But because I hope that someone somewhere will read it and have moment where they realize that this monster called grief must be faced full on and without fear. Because it can consume you and it can take away your life. As it has mine over the past 3 years. My story may take you places you have never been and may never want to go. But I can tell you that once you hear it, it may encourage you to know that someday what you learn may help you to help someone else.

And that is why I write.

Until next time

m