Love is forever…One woman’s journey with grief

As I have mentioned in recent posts, I’ve been in a negative place for a long time, and have become more than a little concerned that I could get stuck there permanently.  On the one hand, grief has its own timetable, and I attempt to rush it at my own peril.  I’ve learned that, and I do not expect to be perfectly well at this point.  I know that, for me, it is still relatively early, despite a year passing.  I know I have a lot more healing to do.  On the other hand, I know that time alone does not heal anything, and you do have to put some energy into it.  If you leave a broken bone unset, in time it’ll heal, in a manner of speaking, but it may well cripple you in the process.  It seems to me that dancing the tightrope between too much effort and not enough is the griever’s next task once survival is once again not only possible, but likely.

But in any case, while I’ve been feeling a little hopeless, listless, joyless, restless, and all sorts of less, I don’t really think it’s good for me.  The mind-body-soul connection is a real one, and if my mind is hanging out in a sewer of negativity, the rest of me doesn’t have much hope of avoiding a nasty infection.  But what to do about it?

A and I often spoke of appreciating the small things in life, and appreciating life, period.  “There’s so much good stuff,” he’d say, wondering how people could NOT appreciate the wonders all around them.  I would agree with him; I couldn’t understand it either.

I was such an innocent.

But nonetheless, there was a time when that’s how I felt about the world, about life, about myself and who I was:  that it was all wondrous.  There was a time when compassion and love were the first and biggest blobs of paint on my emotional palette, and the dark grays and blacks were mere accents on my life’s canvas.  And I think if I could get a little bit of that back, it might well be the medicine I need to get more of it.  Plus, it would be the proper way to remember A.  He liked that I knew how to appreciate life; he would not be happy if I lost that forever.  Neither would I, though it’s seemed out of my hands for the last 14 months.  I told him, early on after he passed, that I would try to live a life that would make him (and me) proud.  I mean to, but the “how” has eluded me.

I decided that if I had to figure out the whole rest of my life now, it’d be a lost cause.  It’s overwhelming, and besides, I know as well as anyone, and better than many, how quickly life can change without warning.  But I thought I could do just about anything for one day.  So Sunday night I said to myself, “For one day, I’ll appreciate and savor everything that’s good.”  My thought was that perhaps I could practice, and then maybe it would take, eventually becoming a habit, and then second nature.  I eventually decided to write it down, too, a list of good things in my day, some small, some really, really small, but positive nonetheless.

By bedtime Monday night, my list had 18 good things.  18 good things!  That was more than one per waking hour.  And while it was the first day, the day was better than those that preceded it.  I don’t know that writing the good things down made the difference, but I don’t know that it didn’t, either.  That is not to say bad things and bullshit and sadness didn’t happen during the day; they certainly did.  But I didn’t obsess about them, and I did not record them.  I only held on to the good things.  And before I went to bed, I made the same promise to myself.  “For one day, I’ll appreciate and savor everything that is good.”

As I write this, it is Tuesday night, and I have 9 things on today’s list.  If you’d asked me last week, I never would’ve estimated I had as many as 9 good things happen to me in a given day.  So I’m not disappointed by the lower number.  9 is impressive to me.  And if I put my dogs on the list every time they made me smile, it would be a longer list.

I found myself looking forward to having things to write on my list, observing carefully for moments where I was content or delighted or comforted so I could write them down.  It’s a very different focus for me, to think that way; the lens of loss and sorrow has been what I’ve been looking through for a long time.  And as it turns out, today was a better day, too.  So I think I’ll try it again tomorrow.  

I was inspired by a George Harrison song on this very theme.  It is no coincidence, I think, that there is a George song about this.  

Just for Today

Just for today
I could try to live through this day only
Not deal with all life’s problems
Just for today

If just (for) today
I could try to live through this day only
Not deal with all life’s problems
Just for today

Sing it, George.