Tag Archives: dealing with grief

The Joy of Grief

Posted on by

Stored grief, trapped grief, neglected and locked up in the basement or attic grief can be ignored. We are encouraged in our culture to imprison it immediately and never look upon its face again.

Stored grief becomes baseline anxiety. It haunts our system like a poltergeist. We may jump at sounds, flinch at a massage therapists touch, see personal attacks in the words or looks of another individual. Stored grief makes us frightened children. We are telling ourselves that we are not big enough, strong enough, mature enough, powerful enough to look at this grief with clear vision. Our culture tells us that we are not whole enough to experience the entirety of emotions.

Only some emotions are allowed in. But grief is already housed in us. We have suffered a plethora of grief stories by the time we are adults. It is a Netflix, Crave vastness of stories of loss, abandonment, physical pain. And we in our human condition are newborn soft. Our bodies are fragile. Our minds are untrained and nervous. Our yearnings are childish. We are walking the earth without armour plating.

And so IT happens. The loss shears away some part of our lives we thought was eternal. The abandonment occurs again and again. The insults to our spirits occur on a daily basis. The more that we are enduring, the more that we are obscuring.

Life strikes us

The only way that we can free ourselves of the fragility of our state is to understand it fully. The body will tell us when we are wounded. The breath will tell us when we are experiencing fear. In that moment, if we are to be adults, we must feel what is happening to us physically. We must stop and see the sadness that has just been triggered within us.

Thich Nhat Han says, “We must hold our grief like a baby.”
The buy cialis wouroud.com problem of impotency is very much embarrassing for men. It generally makes the intimate organs weaker which automatically the buy levitra affects the male reproductive system as such. generic super viagra Continue it for at least 4 months to get optimum results. Partial and final examinations are supposed to be easy means of treatment. online viagra prescription
To sit with the grief, the sadness, the wounding, the pain and hold it in our arms takes an adult spirit. To see that life costs us in so many ways and when the next loss appears, it is our duty to ourselves to hold it in our arms. And so we cry. And so we weep. We release the grief so that it will not haunt us every single day. We are unafraid to say that we are merely human. We are unafraid to say that right now, this day or this week, I am processing grief. It is different than clinging to grief so that we can get attention.

We can grow ourselves.

It is different than dragging grief behind us in the childish grip like a teddy bear.

We recognize the pain of being human when it arises so that we may release it. Only when we are no longer haunted by the locked up ghosts can we let the light and the joy in.

Let us shift the culture so that we allow others to feel both grief and, through releasing it, the joy that comes next. Anger is being worn like a cutting edge fashion statement at the current time.

And anger is neither here nor there.

Throw open your windows to all of life. Get rid of the ghosts.

What to do about Grief?

Posted on by
sunsets

sunsets

My step-father is dying. He who cared for his mother as a boy and had to quit school in Grade 8 to support the two of them is now the invalid. She had MS and his father left without further contact. Left the two of them alone to cope with the world. And she was ill.

He served as a tail gunner for a year and was in London. He hated London. He hated most things. He is good at figuring out what he dislikes which is many things: politicians, camping, strange foods.

Pie. It was pie that we had to stay at the table waiting for as we travelled on holidays across the Southwest, down to California, into Mexico. Coffee and pie finished every meal on the road.

He smoked and hated exercise. He got enough exercise at work unloading beer cases at Lucky Lager. Camping, exercise, strange foods and politicians. He had enough of them.

As my mother fought her death for six years, doing everything she could do to stay on this side, he was puzzled and frustrated. He didn’t understand medicine. She was the nurse all of her professional life. He just had to sit for hours waiting for her treatments to finish, chaufeur her from hospitals to home. Now he hates doctors. Camping, exercise, strange foods, politicians and now mostly doctors.

He fell and broke three of his ribs. “If he had been in better shape,” the two doctors told me at different times. He once said that if he knew he would last this long, he would have listened to ,”your mother. She was always nagging at me to go out for a walk.”
These cover the basics like stop signs but also provide tadalafil cialis india protein synthesis, which can help heal the wounds and protect. 4. Since the problem is widespread problem and needs great concern, but only 20% men with impotence seek for medical help to continue their sexual cialis cost low http://melissaspetsit.com/ready-key-program/ relationship. Major reasons for the ED are heart diseases, cancer, injuries, cerebrovascular illness, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease or COPD, diabetes, flu virus, committing suicide, renal problems and dementia including Alzheimer’s disease. melissaspetsit.com purchase generic cialis This improves blood flow into http://melissaspetsit.com/faqs/ cheap viagra from uk the penile structure.
Life is strange and, well, inexplicable. She who exercised, went to aerobics and was a health care worker died eight years ago. We thought he would give up and die. He bought race horses. More and more race horses. He was engaged, waiting for the next race. Then this year, he sold his horses. They were costing him.

He gave up. When we would phone and ask what he was doing he would say,”Nothing. I am doing nothing like everyday.” But his heart was strong. It is just that he had no heart for life.

Now he is depressed, in pain with every breath, unable to understand what is happening around him and I ask him what happened in his 80 years of life and he said, “Nothing. I didn’t do nothing but go to work.”

He doesn’t remember the pie, he doesn’t remember the mock fights that he and my mother had. My brother and I are deeply in grief because of how he is.

While I was in Portland I heard one young check out clerk call to another in Whole Foods, “How you living, Carl?” “I’m living great,” was the answer. I so want to wrap my arms around this strange, distant man that stood silently in the back of the room while we watched tv, I want to make it better for him. The dying and the life. I grieve for what is happening to him and for what didn’t happen. I can only hold his hand with love now that he will let me.

Note: I had the priviledge to sit vigil with him and to love him out of life. He doesn’t hurt anymore. He doesn’t have to protect himself from feeling anymore.