Coping with loss is difficult and we all struggle at times, that is why I would love more people to become involved with our monthly online meeting. To come out of the grief tunnel we need to learn how to live by ourselves, how to cope with the loneliness, how to find happiness again. So how do we learn? Well I believe there are two ways

1. Reading and sharing with others. If you like, learning the theory of grief and how to cope with bereavement.
2. The ‘doing‘. We need to join life again, we need to break out of our grieving shells and start to put the theory into practice.

For me as long as you are doing one of these then you are progressing and you are on the way. The second part - the joining life again - is tough for me. I am becoming more and more of a loner and find it harder to got out…but we must. It is through friendship and love.…that we will heal our hearts.

The memory that remains so etched on my mind are those final hours, which I can understand. However, as widows and widowers we need to look past the pain so that the painful end to our shared life, doesn’t define our love. When you think about it, you will have been with your partner for years, months, weeks in which we shared laughs and love so intense. Yet we can lose all those happy times because of the pain of their death.

So the easy thing is to say remember the happier times…yet that brings pain too as you ache for those times still to be possible!

It is so strange….almost it is easier to cope with the pain of the death than the pain of the happy memories!

Maybe the trick in grief is to balance the two - coping with the pain of loss with the memories of the happier times?

Death has always scared me, as a child I just comprehend what happened. I think when people have died around me the fact that death scares me makes coping with their loss more difficult because I fear for them.

Last night I was watching Desperate Housewives and Edie died. She said something that stayed with me

“Its not hard to die when you know you have lived”

The reason why is that it reminded me of Dad dying. He said on his third to last day when I asked him if he had any regrets

“Why would I ? I have lived the most wonderful life, had the most wonderful family - when I go to sleep I will have so many memories to keep me warm.”

Maybe we should not fear death, we should fear not living?

[istockphoto]

Today I went to the door to collect the mail and there it was…a letter for him. It has been over 3 years and it has been a long time since I received a letter so it shuck me to the core. The worse thing is that it was for life insurance!

I sometimes think that life throws these little reminders to see how strong your heart is…..they are like checkmarks to see how your grief is progressing, to see how you are coping with your loss.

To some it was junk mail, to me it was the test of my strength - do you know I think I passed…just !

[istockphoto]

Coping with grief is hard as we all know. Over the weekend I got a comment from Shine on Do you ever feel tired of fighting grief, so I wanted to try and reach out this fellow widow. Here are some thoughts from me but I would love your thoughts to help this blog reader as well as they say “I feel very depressed right now and overwelmed with taking care of my children with no help. I feel like I go through cycles of this mood. Does anyone else ?”

• Understand that the feelings are natural and accept that the feelings will not go away in the short term. There is no instant fix, however you can learn to manage the emotions until you are through the grief cycle.
• Set yourself 3 goals each day. Even simple things like clear the washing basket! At the end of the day, tick off your achievements so that you can feel that you are coping.
• Talk to friends, family about how you are feeling…try and choose people that will not sympathise, but empathise. People who will reach out and help on a practical level.
• Write a list of what you feel you cannot cope with at the moment. Then think of a friend who may be able to support you. So if it is your taxes for the year…is there a friend who can do that for you?
• I know you have children however, it is important that you have some “you” time. Maybe take a 20 minute walk   each day, just so that you don’t have people needing your attention. This I see as healing time.
• Is there a bereavement group that you could go to for support in your area?
• Try and spend time together as a family, do things that make the children smile…maybe go bowling, or to a park…a children’s smile is so invigorating  

What I find is that there are no 10 things that you can suggest, it is personal to you. What you do need to think about is creating time for you to think and cope, socialising so that you are feeding off the strength of others and also giving yourself small goals to take to get you through the next few months. Once you start showing yourself you can cope…then you love forward

Franklin Roosevelt once said

“Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds.”  

As widows or widowers, we can blame fate….we can be angry at what the world has thrown at us in terms of the grieving process, we can be angry about the death of a loved one. If we stay a prisoner to fate, that stops us from moving on and coping with the loneliness and depression. So how can we break free from being a prisoner of our mind?

• Break the chain of thinking that we have been hard done by…death happens, in fact death will come to all of us eventually. It is not what happens in life that determines our happiness, it is how we react to events.
• Take the chains off our heart. Our heart was born to love, our heart needs to love. It is a basic need of human beings. We have loved once and we should allow ourselves to love again.
• The grieving process is part of losing someone but it should not become a life sentence…Once we have learned how to cope with the loss, we can start the rehabilitation of our heart and learn to live again…
• Remember we are in control of our minds…we are our own jailor. We need to find a way of releasing those thoughts of the past and find a way of using what we have learned about life and ourselves to bring joy to the world…again.

Grief is difficult, very difficult for adults but I think often underestimate the impact on children. Children are very resilient and often want to hide their true feelings as they know you are struggling to cope with all the practical issues as well as your emotions. They can often be isolated. I was interested to read at the Journal and Courier Online

“Edward Cleaver, bereavement organizer for the camp, said children dealing with grief often believe others don’t feel the same or can understand them. “We want to reduce the isolation they are feeling,” he said.

Matched with a big-buddy counselor, the campers spent the weekend horseback riding, trying archery, strolling in nature and talking in group sessions around a campfire or one-on-one.

Up to 20 kids are recruited in central Indiana to attend. All expenses are covered by donations.

Haley Riemenschneider, 11, of Logasnport had only talked with her mother about her father’s passing until Camp Angel.

“In school they want to know why you are talking to them about it,” she said of her classmates. “Here, everyone understands.”

That last comment was so telling for me…here everyone understands. We do need to ensure that they have a channel of emotional release, a channel for an expression of their thoughts no matter how much they say that they are coping.

I was at the coast this weekend - I love watching the sea. In many ways grief resembles the sea

• It ebbs and flows….somedays better than others
• The power of the wave of grief can be crippling
• The expanse of the sea mirrors the loneliness of the bereaved  
• The different colours illustrates the different moods that you can feel  - from depression to coping.
• The tides show that for each death that happens life goes on….one thing is for certain, that for each loss of life, there will be a birth that gives hope.

I love the sea, I find it is relaxing and soothes my thoughts…

My nana is coming up to 100 years old and I fear the call that says that she is no longer with us. She is special to me, she has been part of my life…I love her to bits. I know that she will not be with us forever but no matter how hard I try, I cannot face not having her there.

We all have said “They died of old age” well I have just read this article in the Dallas News   that says that old age is not a cause of death. It states

“ At the federal level, old age is not considered a cause of death. Organs wear down, diseases catch up; there’s always a specific reason for a person’s death.”

What made me smile was the phrase “a specific reason”. For widows there seems to be no reason at all….but then that is the emotional side of us looking for an explanation to losing someone.

As I said it would have been Dad’s birthday yesterday, although time heals the pain the sense of loss remains deep inside. I am so proud of mum who has never had much confidence, she has rebuilt her life in a way that Dad would have been proud. You can see in her eyes the pain, on days like yesterday and yet the determination that she will value her life closely, as she knows how much my sister and I love her.

They say time heals, I wonder if heals is the right phrase? Time brings the ability to cope but I am not sure that pain heals. I still miss Dad, each and every day. The difference that time has brought for me, is that I am glad that I miss him…I have found a happiness that he was my dad, that I had him in my life, rather than   thinking about the loss.

Grief is hard, coping with bereavement is never easy….but I think we should always remember the joy, the laughter, the luck that we felt that love, love that the world needs.