Are you looking for a “dollop of happiness”
July 14, 2009 by Anna Farmery
Filed under Affirmations of Life
Widows Quest tries to bring people together who in grief feel alone, or are looking for support through their bereavement. Last Friday night we held another online meeting and it was fabulous speaking to readers – actually now friends – of Widows Quest.
I talked about how grief has been strange recently. I feel, most days!, that I can cope but that there is still something missing. I think you can get to a stage where you learn to cope with the emotions on a daily basis but that you still feel that there is just something missing – something I referred to as a “dollop of happiness”
That dollop of happiness will come, I know that but it won’t come of its own accord. There comes a stage when you have to be brave and go and search for it……be brave enough to want to go and search for it.
I know that maybe I am not quite ready, I know that I want to be but I still need to let go of the grief a little more. The tricky balance is knowing when you are ready and when you are thinking you are not ready because you fear joining life again. How do you know?
I think the key is to keep taking small steps back into general life. Keep going out and keep making new friends. I think in these small steps you are making a journey to a much larger one….one that will bring that “dollop of happiness!”
Anna, For some reason that “dollop of happiness” reminded me of my youngest son when he was three years old and he came up to me looking so bewildered and sad while he told me that he wasn’t “having any luck with happiness” that day. I’ve felt that way many times since my spouse died going on two years ago.
I agree that the key is making “small steps” to a better way of living in the face of great loss. As in everything else, I tried to rush things and hoped that I would feel like a new person in six months! How often I have had to learn this lesson – it’s one day at a time and one step at a time. The progress I have made during this time – and I have made progress- has all been in small incremental steps.
Despite some spinal issues, this weekend I will have my new widowed friends come for dinner at my home for the first time since he died. I have been making new friends, working out ways to entertain by preparing things in stages and I am having them in celebration of my spouse’s birthday and the last day he could leave home with his terminal cancer. We will have several toasts I imagine and I really expect we will have a good time.
Today my only, but fine, dollops of happiness were in finding a new store I really like and having a gorgeous sunset after a late afternoon thunderstorm. I find more pleasure in the small things than I ever did I think.
Cindy, I so relate to your comments today. I am of the school of “rushing things” too. I also thought that the mourning would be over by now (a little over a year). My husband’s death has taught me patience. I now know that things take their own time. I am willing to go with the flow now and I know that “that dollop of happiness” that Anna wishes for will come with time. I also know what you mean about finding happiness in the simplest of things like a beautiful sunset. It reminds me that life is definitely worth living. There are many more sunsets and sunrises , the changing of the seasons, a smile or hug from a child, a phone call from a friend, family get togethers, etc. to experience. I intend to do just that.