Sunday, February 06, 2011

Grief in 30

What I know about grief:

1. When it moves in, it brings every piece of baggage it can along with it.
2. It steals your sleep, your concentration, your confidence, your energy, and your peace.
3. It feels endless.
4. It gets better.
5. It gets worse.
6. It's totally unpredictable.
7. It makes you feel desperate.
8. It makes you feel incomplete.
9. It makes you feel scattered, scared, and lonely.
10. It thrives on the chaos it creates.
11. It changes your priorities.
12. It alters your perception.
13. It lies in wait.
14. It attacks without warning.
15. It bleeds you dry.
16. It makes you more compassionate.
17. It makes you more paranoid.
18. It makes you need friends, crave comfort, and beg for mercy.
19. It is ruthless, relentless, and insatiable.
20. It makes you vulnerable.
21. It makes you weep.
22. It makes you scream.
23. It chokes off your words.
24. It strangles your joy.
25. It claws at your heart.
26. It rakes at your mind.
27. It thunders in your ears.
28. It blinds your eyes.
29. It cripples, maims, and scars for life.
30. It makes you wonder if the people you're missing would even recognize the person you are now.

And each day you survive living with it, you win the tiniest little piece of yourself back.

8 comments:

loribeth said...

(((hugs))) I love the last line.

Michele said...

So true...

lady pumpkin said...

Sending many, many hugs.

the misfit said...

I'm so sorry. Keep fighting.

Illanare said...

Sending hugs.

Mali said...

Perfect last line.

JB - A.K.A. Jenn said...

I am sorry for all you have lost-
I truly am.

Thank you so much for having the courage to put into words this cunning, and overwhelming thing we call grief.

No truer words have been written.

Hugs

bleu said...

Dear dear sweet woman,
I have read your blog for years and years. There is never a week or even more than a few days that go by when I do not think of you, honestly. Your grief is palpable to me and always has been. Some because I know the pain of loss and I know grief but at the same time I also am acutely aware one can never truly know an others pain.
I have wanted to speak to you for years, years literally. I want to ease your pain of course. I want to gift you with joy and fill the gaping hole I perceive in your soul and heart. Not that anything can fill it or that I have any right to try or say I know what lies in your heart and soul. I am so aware I do not.

But.

I am afraid of never saying anything and regretting it, or ...... goddess this is so hard.

Please know my words come from so much love for you and your family. You have always seemed to me to be such a beautiful soul. A warm kind woman. A woman so much in pain and despair who I so wish to help.

The thing I have always wanted to say I have no right to and may be so unwanted and I never would wish that. And my greatest fear has always been that my words could possibly cause you further pain which I would never want.

But I am saying it today to you. Forgive me if this is upsetting, please please.

I have always seen you as a mother, to Thomas yes, but in my soul I have always felt you must become a mother to another child, no matter how, no matter from your body or not, from birth or not it has been so strong I have written friends to speak about you and ask their advice. I feel it achingly in my core that your life, that your joy and your path is this, is to find a way to make it happen for you. Through foster or adopt or any other means. And I know that is so easier said than done, I know what you have said about all of it. I do I truly do. I just want you to know I dream about this, it haunts me and I have never understood why it is so, with you, it has never done so with someone else from our land of IF.

I am so sorry for your pain and grief and losses and the new new loss of your dear father.

I wish you so much love and gentleness always and hope with all my heart as I type all this in tears that I have not greatly offended you because with all my heart that is not my intent.