Hey Julie,
There has been a new topic to give my energy to. Something I’ve never heard of in my entire life. Something that threatens to destroy the “new normal” I thought I had to build in sadness and sorrow. While it is very sad that you are no longer with us in this experience of life, I’m learning it doesn’t have to remain that way. There is a decision that can be made to heal.
I’d never heard of Grief Recovery until two days ago. The algorithm for when I login to YouTube lately has been kind enough to give me all kinds of perspectives on what it is to Grieve. Since it wasn’t a topic that was offered in school, I’ve had to inundate my life with trying to understand what it is I’m experiencing. And, I won’t lie, it’s very monochromatic to daily wake up with the void that was your existence alongside me.
What is Grief Recovery, and why haven’t I heard of it until now? I’ve lost a lot of people throughout the course of my 44 years of living. Not one of them had the power to crush my motivation like your death. Everything we either created, or shared in this life is mostly still operating without you. And, that is a hard reality to wake up to every day. Grief Recovery has presented the opportunity to heal in a long lasting manor.
I hate to think that my bride had to die to get me to become motivated about something long lasting. Healing from the trauma of your unique death is a motivator for sure, but sharing what this trauma has done is a daunting task for me. We spent a life trying to keep our private lives private. There’s an undercurrent of fear of what happens when I start digging into where I am in the process of healing from such a painful death. There’s an undercurrent of fear that the pain of watching you what Multiple Myeloma can do to a person will resurface, and I’ll have to keep reliving that pain.
It was hard enough the first time! Being so helpless as your body was assaulted from the inside is something I want to never feel again. It’s not something I would hope anyone would ever feel, but the truth is, I am just one person who has little to no power over the fragility of our lives on this planet.
It was hard enough to wonder what sort of Creator would create a world where such horrible things can happen to any one of us at any moment in the day. To wonder such a thing, and still have to work to find meaning in the activities of the day. It’s so gloomy without you. It’s so anti-productive without your head of steam to “bust butt” to meet the day’s responsibilities. It’s hard writing to the memory of you.
And, that’s where Grief Recovery has caught my attention. It is a traumatic thing to be confronted with our mortality so soon. It was traumatic for me to have been introduced to death at the age of 4. I didn’t have a place in my life to understand why my grandfather was here one Sunday, and gone the next. I didn’t know it was the natural course our lives take. I don’t even think the explanations offered were helpful in giving me language to understand what happened.
Grief Recovery acknowledges the trauma of losing that person, whoever they were, to death. The ripping away of physical interaction in a split second…there are no words to fully encapsulate how devastating it feels to lose someone so close to the heart. But, the thought that it is possible to recover from such a loss? I will never get her back in my life as she was, and that doesn’t have to be the end of my life.
To recover from the grief of death is a prospect I hope to explore in depth because it’s necessary that I share the lessons we learned together. It’s important that I keep looking for opportunities to learn lessons. At this point in the acknowledgment that recovery is available, I do struggle with the power of positive thinking. Knowing that death can come for anyone, at any time, for any reason is a helluva bag to carry.
Grief Recovery allows me to make space to begin to believe that I don’t have to keep carrying the sorrow of the rest of my life without your presence. It allows me to explore how I can enjoy the memories of you when they pop up, instead of panicking, and trying to distract myself so I don’t feel the pain. Grief Recovery has the potential of letting my heart heal so I can move into what’s left for me with confidence that it is worth my time and energy to live. To live with hope that greatness is still possible.
Most importantly, the idea of Grief Recovery has given me the space to see that your death, Dear Julie, is something worth recovering from. Though I will never see you again in this life, I will love you forever with the rest of mine. Grief Recovery has given me eyes to see the wound in that statement, as well as the healing.
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