From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] What I wanted to see, was: how do you REALLY cope with grief? When it really keeps hurting without surprise solutions, when you don't have a deus ex machine hopping along? How do you learn to be strong ON YOUR OWN or just with some pretty average people around you to give pretty average support? How to snap yourself out of that "nothing compares" despair...
Grief is a very personal experience. You cannot "see" what grief is like on a film. My closest grief experience was on the death of my mother in May 2000. her death was unexpected as she was carried away by some unexpected recurrence of a medical problem (not cancer) and she died..... she just died... 12 days start to finish and she was gone. Its like being in a glass tunnel. You are in there shouting and banging the walls that "hey! my mother, my poet, my artist, my wonderfully batty and very irritable mother has died.. Hey!" bang bang bang on the walls and all the time the world just goes on moving past you and you think you wont ever re-join the days of other beings. Its like being stuck in treacle and you just cannot move for the shock of it. How do you get through it? you breathe and you talk and you smoke (if you do..... Oh boy do you smoke) and you laugh and you cry and you do irrelevant things that you do everyday but you notice how irrlevant they are and you change and gradually the automatism of getting through it all just eases.... just a bit. You find you just live. I feel now, almost three years on that she is away on a holiday and won't come back. She has lost her address book and so there are no cards or letters but sometimes when I am writing or when I am sitting thinking about life and times and things that matter I know she is there. I miss her terribly and I see more and more of her in me as the days go by and those similarities emerge in so many ways.. and somehow that helps...tonight was a bit special though.... I went to my daughter's parents evening tonight and sat down infront of her Geography teacher. He looked at me and did a double take.... "I am sorry, but you look like someone I used to teach with, she was my mentor when I first came to this school and you are so like her".... "Well if it was Joy Hone then that was my mother as she taught here"..(my diaghter has her fathers name so he would not have known) and for the next 10 minutes I sat there as he talked lovingly about my mother and how she really really helped him and I felt so happy to have my mother introduced to me from a totally unexpected angle. And that is when I realised the grieving was over. I didn't cry, I did not even get that awful feeling in my stomach when someone talks about her. I just felt so pleased to have had this "contact" and I had not sought it. So to answer your query, we each have our own way that the death of someone special affects us. I hope, if your query is because of a personal situation, that you have the love and support of friends, as that is the key to recovery...looking forward, not back. Breathe and find someting small each day to be thankful for. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ MSN 8: advanced junk mail protection and 2 months FREE*
