Through my journey, I have lived and continue to live through the tough moments and rejoice in the small grateful moments when grief does not seem to demand my full attention.
Every morning, I get up to face a new day, shower most days, make my way to my world of work and buy food on the way home after looking into my children's pitiful eyes saying feed me please. I do this because I feel I have to. I feel that it is what is needed to pull me through, adopting the "fake it until you make it" attitude.
There were times of wishing things were not what they were, holding my breath until Bill magically came back. That did not change things. There were times when I stomped my foot and said, enough, I will change my attitude until I could almost feel the world was right again but just when I thought things were moving forward, grief came taping me on the shoulder.
Which has me wondering why is this so difficult? I am doing what is expected, trying new things to change my attitude or filling my days with being busy to avoid grieving. But where is my heart? Where is my faith in my ability of rejoining the world of the living? I do not want to live as a victim of my grief.
... What the person needs is to make contact with the cohesion of his being. This is not "closure", but "letting go." This is the dynamic of grief. Grief is not the function of a victim but the function of a human being. Grief does not occur only with great disastrous events, but is an everyday ongoing process called living. To stay in the now, where one experiences the liveliness of the process, necessitates being in a state of "letting go" of the past and the future. "Letting go" is an internal process of choice that occurs when a person decides it is time to "let go" and not use the occasion to capitalize upon making contact with the general perception of seeing himself as a victim and use that experience to further his experience of fragmentation around whatever has happened to him.
Fred M. Fariss Ref: http://www.spectacle.org/0701/fariss.html
Is it time to begin to act as though I have an investment in my future? To accept letting go of the past and the future? To open the door to my heart and truly rejoice in what I have, family, friends, my gardens, my photography, my writing, my work? Is this what is meant by letting go?
I see this as very different than "moving on". Letting go will take courage. Courage to step back into the my life and to see what happens.
From my journal of grief: June 10, 2011
Very powerful thoughts Ginette.
ReplyDeleteGinette, I too wonder about these sorts of things. You are much younger than I, so I hope that you will be able to "let go" and make a new life for yourself. However, I think that maybe during the first year it is a time for much reflection and little action.
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