Just Ride the Wave

  If you will please join me on a little trip. Close your eyes…oh, I see the complication in that. Well, barring that you have someone to read this to you, sit and take a deep breath, but keep your eyes open so you can read along. Think of a struggle or a hardship that has bogged you down. Something that has made forward progress or movement difficult and seemingly impossible. It doesn’t have to be grief or loss. It can be a struggle with your health, or with your family. A struggle with money or with well-being. A struggle with direction or perception. Now, how did you get out of it? How do you get out of it? As I stated last week, I started this blog with the intention of helping to process my grief. And I hoped that perhaps some of you would be able to find healing in it as well. I have learned a lot and I have reflected a whole heap. Many have shared their thoughts and stories and I am so grateful for you taking the time to ride with me. I have reached a point where I think I n...

The day hit me when I realized I don't actually have grief figured out (if you are audibly laughing, I don’t blame you at all). I think I had an idea that I knew how to manage all of this. My mom was very positive, a modern day Pollyanna - she always found the good in any situation and I really try to exemplify that. I also believe in God, and I have faith that I will always be okay as a child of God. So, when it comes to hard emotions, I try to go through each situation with the faith that things will be okay and that’s how I try to stay grounded. Sometimes I can push through and sometimes I really struggle; that's when I ask for help. And that's what brought me to journaling this entry following the day I got rocked by my loss. The day that hit me was Christmas.  I survived seeing my mom take her last breath. I survived giving a eulogy at her funeral and her internment where my husband, aunt, cousins and I buried her. I survived her birthday and Thanksgiving. I survived h...

  People will tell you to make new traditions after the loss of a loved one. Make new traditions and carry your loved one with you as you make them. But something about that just seems wrong. It feels like you are accepting your loved one’s death, and that feels like you are letting death win. So instead, we dig in our heels and hold onto every memory we can, and we sit in it. We breathe in our memories so deeply that it feels like they fill every cavity of our being. We are so afraid of losing our memories, losing what we have left, that we let the memories envelop us. But the problem with this, the problem with allowing the past to fill our being, is that it weighs us down. It can weigh us down to the point of paralysis. To the point where we physically can’t move. We can't move forward, we can't move past it, we can't breathe. If healing were a living, breathing thing, it wouldn’t survive here because it would have no oxygen.   How do we give oxygen to healing? How do we...

    The imagination is a cognitive milestone. Children are born with an imagination and when they reach toddler age, they begin to develop their imagination. “You can be the chef and I will be the waitress and Daddy can be the customer. Daddy, no that's not your sock, that's a hotdog I am serving you for dinner.” “No, that coat in the closet isn't a coat, it's a monster!” Imagination leads to daydreaming. “What if I won the lottery? What would I buy first?” Some people see daydreaming as a way to manifest reality. Some find it to be a favorable pastime. Whether sitting in a park, or bored in a meeting, daydreaming is an often sought-after distraction. Sometimes during grief, it is nice to daydream. To think about the person you miss, the times you had, what they would say about a situation, what they liked doing. That daydreaming can quickly cross into thinking of what could have been. There is a fine line between the two I think. I was once guided by a family member wh...

Do you remember in the movie Rush Hour? It’s okay if not, you’ll get the idea. In one scene, Chris Tucker walked into a room filled with bad guys, specifically a group standing by the door. As soon as Chris Tucker entered the room, one of the guys very swiftly kicked him in the face. He felt it but had no idea from where the offending foot came. He said “Which one of ya’ll kicked me?” Grief is like that sometimes. You can be trucking along, minding your business, maybe even having a great day. No Loop here! And then all of the sudden BAM, here comes your old adversary. Perhaps you see a face that looks like your person, or you smell a scent, or you find something that belonged to the person that you thought was lost. This isn't the kind of sadness that comes when you read old letters, listen to sad songs, or look at old photos. This is out of nowhere, shocking sadness. I once experienced this feeling in the Nursing Mothers Room at work. The room, you guessed it, is for breastfeed...

  Most anyone who has lost someone has found themselves in the typically uncomfortable and even painful position of wanting to, and in some cases actually making the moves to, pick up the phone to call that person. This could be once in your life, once in a blue moon, every day, every minute. Most times, we reach for the phone, or we have the thought to call and then find ourselves facing the quick pain of realizing that there would be no one on the other end. The sting can be quick, like stepping on a Lego. But it can also last, like a bite that festers. These thoughts can come regularly but they are usually manageable or at least tolerable. The cycle is the thought, the reality, the sting, the recovery. The recovery brings a little relief and the hope that "maybe I won't have another one of these feelings for a while." However, there are days when I get stuck in, what I refer to as, The Loop. The Loop happens when these thoughts occur on, you guessed it, a loop. You hav...