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Clean your house, or car or office or bedroom - what ever you space is, no matter how small clean it thoroughly and completely. Then go out and get some flowers - something with a good smell if possible. Put them in a well lit place. See how you feel after that.
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The only real point to life is holding on while you have each other - loving fully and completely - but it's a very mortal experience - I don't know that love would be as powerful or as precious if we were immortals. It's natural to feel the way you're feeling--I've been there too--the loss of a beloved derailed me completely for a couple years before I made it through grief. My mother believes gardening heals everything--and I suspect it does--she dug so many holes I thought she'd end up in Australia. So my advice is find the thing that you can immerse yourself in until you've worked through your grief or your grief is done working through you. Join a grief group--sometimes only those who are experiencing loss understand what we're experiencing. I found it hard to listen to the empty platitudes of people who were inconvenienced by my grief and only wanted me to joke again to entertain them. A grief group was a safe place to be when I experienced feelings like yours.
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The only real point to life is holding on while you have each other - loving fully and completely - but it's a very mortal experience - I don't know that love would be as powerful or as precious if we were immortals. It's natural to feel the way you're feeling--I've been there too--the loss of a beloved derailed me completely for a couple years before I made it through grief. My mother believes gardening heals everything--and I suspect it does--she dug so many holes I thought she'd end up in Australia. So my advice is find the thing that you can immerse yourself in until you've worked through your grief or your grief is done working through you. Join a grief group--sometimes only those who are experiencing loss understand what we're experiencing. I found it hard to listen to the empty platitudes of people who were inconvenienced by my grief and only wanted me to joke again to entertain them. A grief group was a safe place to be when I experienced feelings like yours.
I hate to bring up a television show in this conversation but a series I really liked ended last night with words of wisdom on loss and letting go. I especially loved how the writers ended each show with the main character giving a voiceover with some bit of wisdom--me, I grab wisdom wherever I can find it--I think the writer of this must have experienced loss--grief--endings too in order to understand it this well:
Nobody likes letting go. From our earliest moments from birth 'til we're six feet under our instinct is to grab, grip, cling, to a finger - a bottle - a best friend - to a faded old racing form. Sometimes we hold on for dear life to the very things that keep us from actually living it. But that comes with an upside. It's the way we feel when we finally let go. The trick, I guess, is to not find a way around the curve balls life serves up but to live with them in halfway-happy uneasy alliance and to search for new things to cling to and when you finally find them to hang on just as tight. And around and around we go. Holding on until the time comes to say goodbye and like it or not, ready or not, you have to accept one universal truth. Life is messy, always, and for all of us. But a wise man once said maybe messy is what you need and I think he might be right. (from the series finale of In Plain Sight)
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Keep talking,
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Keep talking,
Keep looking for friends to come along side you,
Gradually these conversations will make you move towards a more, "why not me?" rather than the feeling you have been picked on.
None of this will help right now, but eventually it may be possible
To Ask yourself, why are there happy widows in this world?
Why does my friend Steve whose parents have died, wife died of cancer at 44, only child of unexplained death at 19, why does he smile and enjoy life now...?
(despite going through a pretty awful existential crisis of bereavement)
There are thousands of people who go through these horrors,
and survive to rediscover joy.
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Nothing we can do, no nurtured mindset can keep life from feeling like a cruel joke at times.
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Nothing we can do, no nurtured mindset can keep life from feeling like a cruel joke at times.
The best path to successful living that I've found found to date . . . is to yourself become the successful punch-line to that cruel joke.
Many (perhaps most) people are going to come face to face with the "injustices" of life. And why are they "unjust"? Often because they are not to our liking. Or they don't cater to us. People live and die. People enjoy health and then fall into sickness. And not just people. Plants; animals. Even the Earth someday. So is life unfair and unjust? Or it "just is"?
Is it just unfair/unjust because things do not happen as we would like to see them happen?
(Sorry, that's not where I was meaning to go, but it just presented itself and could be something to find value in -- or not!)
Back to you becoming the "punch-line". Life is unfair, from our perspective. Death and tragedy happen . . . and the most "natural", the "easiest" thing to do is get ourselves into existential crises. They are natural. They are Human. And you would not be Human if you didn't go there; didn't taste the sadness; didn't have to face life's starkest and toughest questions.
But then you can say, "This will not break me".
"I will not get so tightly wound-up in the imprisoning death-spiral of "Why??" that I cannot in the proper time, move on to the healthier question of "How will I proceed successfully from here?".
"Why?" entreats us sit down and put our head in our hands and do nothing of value while we waste away.
"How will I proceed?" exhorts us to stand up and start forging a path away from that low/dark spot.
A spot that we had to visit lest we spend our entire life in ignorance of such places existing; or incompetence in how to successfully navigate away from them.
They can make us stronger; and in this they can be like precious gifts.
(But this can only be seen in hindsite: after we've grieved, after we've asked "Why?" and sat for a while, after we started asking "How?" and have navigated a distance away. There are times in life to be sad, to ask why, to wonder which way to go. But woe to the person who never gets up and walks away from them).
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In the severe fatal illness you have spoke of, be there for the dying loved one. Don't ask them to tell you what you can do for them, because that person will not tell you that they need something. That loved one doesn't want to bother you with things they need. So, what you need to do is be there for him/her. Be there and figure out what needs to be done -- and do it. Figure out what needs to be brought to bring comfort --- and bring it. Don't wait to be asked because that loved one will never ask --- just be there and help out. Just be a listening ear and a shoulder to lean on.
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You are already beginning the grief process. The only way through it is to go through it. Don't skip any of the steps in your grief process. If you try to skip steps, those steps still need to be done and they will hit you later on. So feel what you feel as you feel it.
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You are already beginning the grief process. The only way through it is to go through it. Don't skip any of the steps in your grief process. If you try to skip steps, those steps still need to be done and they will hit you later on. So feel what you feel as you feel it.
8 years ago, my husband died after a long illness. First my sister-in-law died, then my Dad died. Then my husband's father died and my husband died. When I called my mother-in-law to tell her that her son had died, the family told me my mother-in law died that morning. I have been married 5 times and all but one of my husbands have died. I have grieved on top of grief. Eventually you will heal from all of this with time. Sometimes levity helps. I cried to my Mom how everyone is dying, all at once. My Mom (who was in grief from Dad's death) said, "Learn to cook!" That was humor, of course.
I was so crushed with all the deaths in my family and my own husband's death that I stopped watching movies and listening to music. I was taking a shortcut in my grief process. It has been 8 years. I pulled out of it and fell in love this last summer. Along with new hope, I started listening to love songs again .... and the love songs hurt and I had to cry. It was a step in the grief process I had tried to skip over and it caught up to me. I am ready to love again and get on with life. Go forward with joy. Life will have meaning again. You will find happiness again. It will take time and tears.
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What you are asking us to do is take the pain away so you dont have to mourn. But mourning is an important process. If you dont allow yourself to mourn, you will never get over it.
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What you are asking us to do is take the pain away so you dont have to mourn. But mourning is an important process. If you dont allow yourself to mourn, you will never get over it.
I once read a book on mourning that had a very illustrative analogy of 2 widowers. One cried and raved and ranted and really went on everybody`s nerves when his wife died. Lets say: he mourned loudly and vehemently. The other was stoic and kept it all in. The former was laughing and remarried 5 years later. The latter was still paralyzed 5 years later. Get my gist? You HAVE to mourn. And I`m sorry and I know it hurts. Maybe you can find somebody to hold you while you cry.
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Life implies death ~ death implies life.
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