Grief causes all kind of emotional stress and all sorts of different emotions to flow through your body - anger, sadness, depression, crying, apathy, numbness, loneliness….

I asked yesterday to Let’s Support a Military Widow who is struggling with her emotions. A oouple of comments made me think

• Feelings are what separates us from machine. Feelings make us human.
• Feelings should be cherished and not feared….it is a sign that we are a living human being.
• Feelings are negative only when we see them as negative. If we believe we are depressed then we are…if we see our depression as part of the grief process and learn to start seeing what we can do and what we have rather than what we can’t and what we have lost…then we can start moving forward.
• Feelings are universal…we all feel….we should never feel ashamed of crying in public as it is a sign of our strength not a weakness. I say a strength because we recognise our feelings and are not ashamed to show our pain

I am not going to fear the feelings any more, I will embrace them as part of me. I want to be a   whole human being that feels all the range of emotions - that will make me stronger and a better human being.

After all if we embrace the fear doesn’t the fear go away?

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 I wrote a post called Finding Your Strengths for a New Life and received a heart tugging comment from a recent widow here is a snippet

“I really do miss my dearest husband and I instantly start to cry when I look at our pictures. This has not been happening lately, but today I feel down and am in need of finding someone to talk to. My mother is around, but she seems to become worse if I open up for her.
So I really don’t know what to do….”

I know we all know that feeling, I know that none of us can take away the pain but I do know that there is a wonderful community who will want to reach out and help - any advice you can give please leave a comment.

My thoughts are

• You are going through the grief cycle. Your feelings, your tears are your heart showing the world its pain. With a broken leg, the world gives you a cast…with a broken heart they don’t, but it still needs to heal. Don’t fear the tears, let your heart recover in its own way.
•  When I didn’t feel that I had anyone to talk to, I started a journal and used to write my feelings down. I felt that I either had to talk or write…..I needed to release the pain.
• Is there a support group that you could go to for military widows ? That would be good as those people understand losing your husband in war.
• There is no logic to loss. I think when I came to terms with there was nothing that I could do to change his death…then I started to move forward. We cannot make sense of what has happened, we cannot bring them back….what I then did was concentrate on how I could honor his memory…it gave me something to focus on for the future rather than thinking about what had happened

I know the community here will help you. We understand your pain and are here for you…talk to us, share your feelings, we will see you through the pain

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