Love can be spectacular and yet when you think about love can be dangerous.

• Love makes you lose control with giddiness
• Love can cause fear…fear of losing your love
• Love causes pain when they are taken from you

Love is comforting, love is precious and yet it makes me wonder why something so wonderful can never be enjoyed without pain. So would I say it was worth it…would I want to have felt love if I had realised the danger….

…YES.

The comments to Don’t Forget the Good Times really touched my heart. Anniversaries are tough and I thought I would share how I cope…as I said in my comment to the blog post

“Pain makes me realise my heart is still alive, it is still feeling….pain means that the love is still alive.”

So often during bereavement you can feel numb, you can feel, well actually not feel anything. It was my Nana who taught me something about heartache. She said “Heartache takes away the numbness. Heartache means that your heart is alive and still capable of loving. Heartache means that your love has not died with their death. Heartache should be embraced over the years as it is a positive sign that your love endures, and your heart is learning to love again”

At the time I thought this was daft! But now I think I believe in this idea. Now as the pain increases I smile as I don’t feel the hurt, I try and feel the love. I am not sure if this will help - but always remember we are all here for you.

Widows Quest is wonderful for how people share stories and also thoughts on death and coping with grief. Cindy left a comment to the post Love is Immortal and I thought I would share a quote that she left on the blog

“Death is not the greatest loss in life. The greatest loss is what dies inside of us while we live.”

by Norman Cousins

…I would add that maybe the greatest loss is when we allow what dies inside, to define who we are in the future. Something may die, but remember the body and mind may live…

Is part of the grief process defining yourself without relying on others?

Often in the comments we talk about being a partner, mother, wife, husband…….all definitions of relationships of love. We rarely talk about just us  - as an individual, as a human being, as our own personality?

I am wondering whether coping with death is about renewing the relationship of love with yourself…we spend so much of our time loving others…do we forget how to love ourselves?

I think that is true for me….in the future I can only love, if I learn to love myself.

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Anger and grief was a topic I wrote about last weekend, and one comment that was left was “is it wrong to feel anger towards the one that left you…”

When I thought about it, I couldn’t make up my mind as I think the answer is both Yes and No!

1. Yes because anger means that you have felt love, yes because loss is emotional, yes because it hurts, yes because death seems unfair, yes because it allows you to cope with your grief.
2. No because anger doesn’t bring them back, no because anger is not a positive emotion, no because death is something that happens to us all, no because it is selfish, no because we should concentrate on what we have gained through their life not lost through their death.

Therefore I think the answer is …..it is OK to feel anger whilst coping with grief but don’t let the anger control you or your life.

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I am excited by our planned phone call on Friday night - 6pm New York time and of course if any other widows and widowers want to join us and talk about how they are coping with grief, about the blog posts which help most with your bereavement or just for support and friendship - then the details are on our Widows Wiki.

Why am I excited?

Because I know you all understand grief, I know that we have shared hopes, shared pains, that we are sharing each others journey through that dark tunnel of pain to that day when we wake up and feel happiness again.

It does make you think about the power of sharing. Yet when you suffer death, you seem to not want to share….for me I think it was a reaction to sharing my love and then that being lost. You don’t want to share because you don’t feel people will understand….well not Friday, we will all understand and that is why I cannot wait to hear the voices of the Widows Quest Community.

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Grief is like the meandering river that flows across the lands. Sometimes the gentle flow of memories, other times when the love and pain collide - the torrents of pain become emotional waves that simply cannot be controlled.

Grief is the river that is a continuous journey across one side of your life to another…

Grief is the river in which your earlier dreams and hopes flow to create the nightmares that engulf   your life.

Grief is like cold water pain that shocks the warm feelings of love…..

Grief is the natural spring water that flows from giving your heart to the one you love…eventually….because eventually all love will part.

Grief - the river that no one wants to experience and yet the river that nature will always make us endure at some stage of our life

Does anyone feel that inner craving for love, for passion ? I keep watching romantic love films as a way of satisfying that inner need of ..feeling love, of feeling that intense emotion when two people lose themselves completely in each other.

I wonder whether the love stories feed the need or satisfy the need?

I have always been a romantic and to some extent always needed the belief of love to feed my soul! I find that now I hide that side, or I show that side when I am alone with the films. That makes me so sad, so empty.

I dream of the day that I maybe find that person who will fall in love with that romantic side again and ….. and once more I am whole again, but maybe that will never be possible?

I once heard someone in a film talking about love and describing true love as someone

“who helps you to reach beyond yourself” and who sees you “more truly than anyone else ever has or ever will“.

I love those words and believe in our time of grief we can pull on that love - because in getting through the bereavement we need to reach beyond what we think we are capable of…..but remember that love, their love which encouraged you to think and achieve more than you ever thought yourself capable of..

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Sometimes I feel that I have developed a split personality since my bereavement. Why? Because one moment I feel so much love and such happiness that I have felt the most incredible love and then the next moment I am angry…angry to have lost that one special person in my life.

From love to anger and back again in 60 seconds.

In one sense I love it as after the death I thought I would never be able to feel again, that my whole emotional being had shut down so that I never had to hurt again….therefore the anger and the love, show me that underneath that protective layer I can still ..

I think in learning to cope it is not about getting rid of the emotions, it is about taking out the peaks and troughs of the emotion, it is about taking the emotions from an extreme like anger to a more liveable ’sad’

Death maybe the end in one sense, but death is only the start of finding more and more about yourself