Grappling with Grief

What a startling discovery to experience waves of sadness dissipating as quickly as they wash over! Most of my life I have resisted sadness, "Oh, it's okay, look on the bright side." I'd say as I push away negative feelings. I am the strong one, the bearer of sunshine in a dark room. High school had been tremendously hard on me; when I asked for help for my depression, I was told to put it all behind me. Focusing on the positive was my survival, how I coped.

My father was in a near death truck accident in 1972. For thirty days my mother sat by his hospital bed, my sister sat by her side. The family of the young man who ran the stop sign on a county road on the way home from the tractor pull hung out in the intensive care waiting room beside my family as we all held our breath. The tension was high as it was this kid's car that hit my father's flat bed truck with his prize wining A BOMB pulling tractor which toppled into the ditch in a tangled mass of orange iron. After thirty long days of slowly progressing recovery for both the 21 year old car driver man and the 65 year old tractor driver, I visited the hospital, located 120 miles from our home. I began telling stories that released some long suppressed laughter, providing some long needed relief.

For the next more than forty years, I maintained the role of putting a positive spin on everything. When my mother died twenty five years after that accident, and my dad seven years after her, I celebrated the fact that they had such rich, full lives, they were abundantly generous and progressively active. I didn't grieve with tears. I moved forward.

Through the years, well-meaning people continually encouraged me to 'feel my feelings.' Fear, anger and sadness tried many times to get my attention but I was masterful at resisting them. Then my son's family moved across the country and I had no coping mechanism to deal with my pain. I feel depression symptoms like when I was sixteen.

What I learned is that I can feel pain and survive. A couple of years after my son moved away, my partner moved out. Again, I discovered I could feel the pain deeply and still carry on. My cracked open heart allowed me to feel deeper pleasant emotions as well. I began feeling more and more alive. The past few years I have learned several coping mechanisms that helped me feel my pain, full out, then allow it to pass through me. Mostly I found I need to balance all there is to do to keep functioning while also making time to fully feel my sadness. Like stop, listen to my heart and allow it to speak to me, to tell me what hurts. Spending time alone provides the space to clarify why I am hurting which reminds me the pain is temporary.

I've heard from several reliable sources that emotional pain will only last about 90 seconds unless there is a story attached to it. In the quiet time, I give myself permission to grieve, feel the ache then I practice detaching from the story. I may rather be comforted by another human, that can come later. If I don't work through it on my own, then I am temped to retell a story or listen to justification for my pain. Grief is not something that reasoning will help.

Yes, I love the Barbara Streisand lyric, "People who need people are the luckiest people in the world." Being kind to myself, taking time for all my emotions, welcoming all parts of me, all my feelings and all my expressions has helped me grow stronger and more tolerant of the people in my life. We all grieve differently. I had to develop the emotional maturity to trust I could feel my pain without it destroying me. I'm not advocating we do this alone, only that we be clear on what we are feeling and allow for all our feelings, then move forward.

I'd be very interested in hearing how you cope when grief strikes. Please share what you've learned.