Each morning before I rise I lay there hearing Stewie shake is collar and the tinkle of the dog tags tell me "Get up!". The day begins and I pad quietly down the hall, dark with the change in time (of which I hate to lose that extra hour of sleep), let the pups out, wake the computer to see the new mail, let the pups in, feed them, let them out again, and then make Ryan's lunch. Day in day out. I can't help but think that while all the years of doing this haven't always been the same as some years it was rising to pick up a hungry baby, or being woken by the jumping on the bed of our children, or the running down the hall of little feet, but it is I who rises in the early morning to begin the ritual of a day.
Somehow this death of my mom has tip-toed in my thoughts of how many years I have before I too have aged and can no longer do this early rising. I don't have plans this will happen and actually once that thought creeps in I firmly tell it to go away. What is happening is the essence of accepting that time is ticking on whether I want it to or not. My parents are gone. The quiet is deep and these days it is a place I do not enter on any level. It's not that I don't want to think it over in my head, I just can't even enter that place. I can't tell if the door is locked or open it's so dark. The other night I couldn't sleep and I got up to have a bowl of cereal, read the paper, then back to bed. I had turned out the lights in the kitchen and going back to our bedroom it was pitch black. I reached my hands out so I wouldn't bump the walls or furniture and softly felt my way down the long hall and back to bed. That is the dark I feel. I keep reaching out so that I don't bump myself. Maybe I'm suppose to though. Maybe if I bump myself the grieving will move forward and away. I don't know.
This was from a web site : http://www.connect.legacy.com/inspire/page/show?id=1984035%3APage%3A3305 called Legacy Connect. The article was titled "The Work of Grief". Yes, this made sense. The opening paragraph explains this:
As a griever, you need to appreciate the fact that grief is work. It requires the expenditure of both physical and emotional energy. It is no less strenuous a task than digging a ditch or any other physical labor. The term “grief work” was coined by psychiatrist Erich Lindemann in 1944 to describe the tasks and processes that you must complete successfully in order to resolve your grief. The term shows that grief is something you must work at actively if you are to resolve it in a healthy fashion. It demands much more than merely passively experiencing your reactions to loss: you must actively do things and undertake specific courses of thought and action to integrate and resolve your grief.
I read this and it felt like what I was feeling:
Sometimes the death of a loved one brings up not only grief for what you lost, but also grief for what you never had and now never will have. For example, if you had a very conflicted relationship with your mother, when she dies you may grieve not only for what you have lost, but also for the fact that you never had a better relationship with her, that she never was the kind of mother you wanted her to be, and that now you will never have even the hope that it could change and you could get what you want. In such a case you grieve for the past, present, and future.
How long will my grief last?
In another article from Legacy.com I found this speaking of time. Grief can be measured in Chronos time, as in weeks, months and years but also in Kairos time which is "The time within which personal life moves forward".
What matters is kairos time. What insights have I had? What have I realized? What meaning am I making of this terrible loss? We each have our own “entelechy”—to use a term from anthropology—that means our own “immanent force controlling and directing development.”
Well this helps. In some odd way then I don't have a date at which I will be over this grief. I need to work through and seek my path, this journey of letting go of what I can not change. Does this give me hope? Yes. Does this take pressure off of me? Yes. Is it easy? No. I do better with directions and I'm unsure what will reveal itself as I "work through my grief".
1 comment:
Wow. This brings up a lot for me. Mostly...my lack of grieving after my mother died. THAT feels unnatural but it is what it is. Perhaps I had given up fully and truly before she died that she would ever be the mother I wanted and needed. I think I had. And so when she died, it was mostly relief I felt.
She was gone, both body and spirit and I didn't have to worry any more. I feel some guilt over that- my relief, my lack of grief. But not much. Not much at all.
Everyone's journey is so different.
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