1. Face the world without your loved one
2. Face the world who feel uncomfortable knowing what to say to you
3. Face the problems of others that seem “trivial” to you at this time
4. Not grieve. You want to be free to think about them, to weep for their loss.

But we know that loneliness will only make us feel worse. Some time alone I think is good just to come to terms but when you start rejecting the world, invitations on a regular basis – and even in my case shopping on the internet so I don’t have to bump into someone who is going to ask how I am! – then the time has come to talk to yourself.

Yesterday I was down, I was wondering what life was all about. But then a friend phoned and said “I bet you feel empty. I know that you won’t want to come out, so I am coming over, food in hand, drink in hand and we will have a good old catch up”

She has just arrived and I am so glad that she came over. Already she has brought an energy to the house. Friendship isn’t always about dragging people out of the house. Sometimes it is coming to them and providing almost a half way house to civilisation. Don’t reject those offers of friendships….see it as a sign that you are a good person who people care about….see it as a way slowly of moving through the grief cycle.

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“You are as young as you faith, as old as your doubt; as young as your self-confidence, as old as your fears; as young as your hope, as old as your despair. In the central place of every heart, there is a recording chamber, so long as it receives messages of beauty and hope, cheer and courage, you are young. When the wires are all down and your heart is covered with the snows of pessimism and the ice of opinion, then and only then, have you grown old”

(General MacArthur)

How true this is…..how much do you invest your time in creating beauty and hope? How much cheer do you search for? Human life is short – we know more than most – lets not waste it with “snows of pessimism” but the “sunshine of hope”

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“We will have good and bad times, it is how we maximise the good to help cope with the bad!”

And I think that is true. I have written many times about the rollercoaster nature of grief….and rollercoaster’s can truly make you feel scared, feel ill and never want to experience that feeling again.

Life during ‘normal’ times can be hard, a loss of a job, money worries, illness, stresses etc but when you through in grief it makes those highs and those lows ….well, sharper and more frightening.

It is not that ‘normal’ life is level….it is just that we learn to cheer ourselves up by going to a concert, or out with friends or treating ourselves to some shoes:)

In grief we must learn to do the same. On those days that are better, try and store up that feeling, try to put reminders of you coping around the house or in a journal. Because just life ‘normal’ life it is those memories that help us cope with the troughs of depression, the lows of loneliness and the heartache of grief.

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Don’t resist them – that only creates sorrow.

Let reality be reality”

Lao-tse Chinese Philosopher

For the next few posts I want to pick out some quotes which I have written down from the book I by Jim Clemmer, I told you about in Coping with Change in Our Life.

This quote stood out because it made me think how in a sense – bear with me on this! – it is not the death which creates our grief but our resistance to accepting what has happened. It is our resistance to letting go, to accepting they won’t come back, to learning to live solo once again…that creates that sense of loneliness and often depression.

Yet that resistance is only creating sorrow…it is not making anything better, it is not bringing them back, it is merely creating even more pain. We have already felt the pain of loss, then we go and add to it by resisting that change has happened.

I make is sound so easy…just stop resisting and everything will be fine!…and I know that it is not easy. However, acceptance is such a huge part of our new life, acceptance is the only antidote to resistance.

Maybe we should write down all the things which we are resisting and plan a way of accepting them? What do you resist the most?

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Not because I am against the celebration but my grief meant that I found these kind of events so difficult to deal with, and faced with that difficulty I just wanted to hide from all that….jollity!

Tonight is halloween and I have really made an effort tonight…there are spiders webs, pumpkins, Happy Halloween posters…far too many sweets and loads of lights.

I decided that tonight I would revel in those happy little faces of those children, I would watch their naive smiles that have not been touched by the ‘horrors’  of life and feed off their happiness. I decided that instead of dreading their happiness, instead of resenting these kind of family ocassions …I would embrace the idea.

I think it is easy to hide behind a door…..it is much harder to face the world but tonight I want to spread that little bit of happiness which I so crave for….now all I need is the darkness to fall which on this occassion is a good thing!

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Grief

When I think about it….for me there is a bit of both

1. Tangible – there is that element of being alone, being the only person in the home, in the car, in the bed. There is that element of tangible problems like financial worries, family disagreements. There is the emptying of the house…eventually.
2. Intangible – the pain is about feelings, it is about hurt, it is literally the heart aching or breaking. It is not that we have lost the love, it is the fact that we have lost the person…and the feeling of being loved.

Why I think about this is that making a list of what hurts us the most, what makes us grieve and then thinking about all the items as tangible or intangible can help….

The tangible problems can have tangible answers eg. loneliness can be helped through company.

The intangible problems can be worked on through talking, through understanding, through acceptance or even through counselling.

Post from: Widows Quest

When I was coughing away, by myself this weekend, feeling sorry for myself that there was no one in the house just to look after me….(how old am I!) I started to think about connection. When we enter the world we are physically connected with our mothers…we depended on their nourishment in the womb, we depend on their milk, their support and security throughout our childhood.

When you think about it we are hard wired to connect, if we block that desire to connect then are we in the short term blocking the pain but in the long term harming our emotional health?

If we go without water we die…

If we go without food we die

If we go without love….does our soul die?

Post from: Widows Quest

I was trying to think the other day of the positives of getting old….?

• Experience to handle life?
• Memories to cherish
• Ability to help younger people develop and grow
• Family and extended family
• More comfortable in your own skin

Maybe because it is one of those days! (I need our Widows Quest Support Group Meeting this Friday) but then I thought of all the negatives

• aches and pains
• understanding life so much better and having a lack of energy to live it!
• pains and scars of life on the heart

Am I just feeling low? Maybe and yet I always look in the mirror and wonder what really is that great about getting old….do you think more about your age being a widow or widower or is it just me?

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I Shall Be Glad
by Grace Noll Crowell If I can put new hope within the heart
Of one who has lost hope,
If I can help a brother up
Some difficult long slope
That seems too steep for tired feet to go,
If I can help him climb
Into the light upon the hill’s far crest,
I shall begrudge no time
Or strength that I spend, for well I know
How great may be his need.
If I can help through any darkened hour,
I shall be glad indeed.

For I recall how often I have been
Distressed, distraught, dismayed,
And hands have reached to help, and voices called
That kept me unafraid.
If I can share this help that I have had,
God knows I shall be glad.

We may not have those things dear in our heart by our side…..but as long as we have hope, as long as we have belief, as long as we have each other…we can cope and grow from grief…xx Love Anna

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I cried when I read her thoughts..why? Because I hate people hurting…I so wish that I had a magic bereavement wand that would take away all our pain.

But it made me think about how we emotionally attach to objects….mmmm…but then is it really the object that we attach to? In Leslie’s case it is a house, with me it is a jumper! But when you think about it, we are not really attached to the object we are attached to the memories.

When you think about it, memories are movable…..maybe what we need to do is realise that the object is only a trigger to the memory? Therefore if we find a new trigger than we retain the happy memories….

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