Saturday: Dreaming Big - My 'Wild and Precious Life'

Thank you for reading.  I think I've figured out how to make these links work from here, but if you ever have difficulty, please feel free to message me through Blogger. 

Dreaming Big - My 'Wild and Precious Life'

Thursday: Don't Judge My Grief

A Week of Little Thoughts About Life

I’ve worked with people who are grieving husbands, wives, adult children, miscarriages, stillborns, brothers, mothers, fathers, sisters, abortions, friends, and dogs.

When you read that sentence, you may have found yourself judging something about one of the losses I listed. You may have found yourself thinking, well, a dog isn’t the same as a father. Or, if she didn’t want to grieve an abortion, she shouldn’t have had one.

Or, you may have been on the receiving end of a judgement or assumption about your own grief, “Your mother died over a year ago…you should be moving on by now.” Or, “You never really knew your baby, that’s not the same as someone who has had a child for years and gotten to know them.” Or even, “You must miss your mom so much,” even though you and your mom were not close for years.

The problem with judging grief is that we never know the whole story. The grief someone experiences is in the context of their whole life –

· All the other relationships they have,

· Losses and trauma that have come before,

· Who and how they experience trust,

· What was the nature of that particular relationship,

· What were the griever’s hopes and expectations in life, and

· What is the general personality and coping of the griever

Some of the toughest grief I’ve ever witnessed is the loss of a spouse — especially when that marriage happened when people were young. I’ve worked with a number of wives, who married a high school sweetheart at around the time they were 18 or 20 years old. They moved from their parents’ home in with their husband. The marriages worked in part because the ‘kids’ who got married, grew up together. They formed everything about one another. I’ve found the wives to be strong and interesting women, who loved strong and interesting men. Their identities were individual, yet also bound together. When the husband dies after 30, 40 or more years, the wife is left to rebuild from the very core of her being.

Before I worked in grief, I would have had a bias — something like, “Listen — you get married. Someone’s got to die first and it’s usually the man. On some level, a person has to be prepared for this, right?” Do you read my judgement in that? One gift of working in the field of death, dying and grief is that my pre-conceived notions are challenged.

And I’ve found that I have to let them go.

A man I know lost his dad to suicide. The ‘story’ so often reflected from friends and extended family is that his dad ‘finally lost his battle with depression.’ This is an assumption about his dad and his grief, that he finds enraging. His dad did not suffer from lifelong depression and the circumstances that came together that opened the door to suicide remain mysterious and distressing.

If you are experiencing judgement around your grief you may also be experiencing rage, isolation, irritability, despair or confusion. You may be wondering, “Am I supposed to be feeling different than I am?”

You are the expert on your own grief and you are the expert on the person you love who died and the nature of that relationship.

The most grieved I’ve ever felt was when my marriage ended. Many people know about the end of my marriage and loved and supported me through that. My own aunt, whose husband (my uncle), died unexpectedly at the age of 65 said, “What you are going through is worse than what I went through. You don’t really get closure.” That felt incredibly supportive, but it also points to our human want to measure the weight of grief. This or that grief is worse or easier than another grief. Or we make assumptions that we know or can guess what that grief feels like for that person.

Human connection and support is essential — really the foundation of moving through the pain of grief. If you are grieving, life is asking something heroic of you — you must seek and accept what love and care others have to offer you, at the same time you accept that there is a part of grief you will walk alone. We are understood, but we may not be fully understood. Our loss is shared with those who love us, but it is exquisitely individual as well.

Be gentle with grievers. Be gentle with yourself.

Below is a pretty comprehensive list of grief resources. I would also add Compassionate Friends for child loss.

https://www.mastersincounseling.org/guide/loss-grief-bereavement/

Friday: No, I Don't Watch This Is Us

A Week of Little Thoughts About Life

One of the biggest mistakes I’ve ever made is letting my daughter read and watch the Twilight series the summer before 6th grade. Since then, she’s been a romance maniac. She loves to read and watch anything about romance and I can only hope that I’ve broadened her taste from Twilight and Titanic by adding in Mystic Pizza and Moonstruck. (Oh my God, I had no idea I loved Italians in love until I just wrote that sentence.)

So, it was in the vein of movies about love that she’s been jonesing to see the Bradley Cooper/Lady Gaga remake of A Star Is Born. Which we watched the other night. She loved it — the exquisite tragedy of their romance. I hated it.

It felt like going to work.

Depression, addiction, suicide. For a therapist, this is not what I would call entertainment, this is what I call sad.

I am a big advocate of stories. Stories, movies, song lyrics, fiction and poetry help us understand other people’s point of view and put ourselves in their shoes. It expands our understanding of the human experience and ignites our imagination — what would it have felt like to be second class on the Titanic? What would it feel like to get up on stage and sing a song for the first time in front of a stadium of people?

I spend many hours a week deeply imagining what it would be like to lose a father to suicide or cope with a child’s diagnosis with autism or live with a husband who seemed not to care that I’d been diagnosed with Parkinson’s.

I love my work. My work has made me who I am in so many ways. But in my free time, I don’t want to imagine what it’s like to hurt.

Sometimes, I like to watch very frivolous things like The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills (Camille is the WORST!). I like to be funny and silly as much as possible. I don’t like to borrow tragedy.

Mostly, the stories I find myself drawn to seem to draw out both the comic and the tragic. One of my very favorite movies is Little Miss Sunshine. One reason for this is that I can identify with each member of the family, but mostly the teenage boy.

I have an inner teenage persona who often shows up around the holidays. This angsty version of me is strikingly like the teenage boy in the movie The stress of the holidays, the time commitments, the rushing current from one family gathering to the next, the heightened feelings of family members — I draw on that teenager to be my pal — “Welcome to Hell” he writes on a sign that he holds up to show his uncle when his uncle comes to stay at their house after a failed love affair and suicide attempt. It never fails to both crack me up and comfort me. Do we all feel like this about our family sometimes? I am sure my son feels the same way when I am driving he and his friends to a movie.

But the glory of that movie is that each one of them is pursuing their dreams, showing up totally flawed, and in the end — through failure, death, tears, and laughter, they come together to love and support one another. They embrace their own chaos and foibles… and they dance.

In the 1700s, a philosopher named Horace Walpole wrote, “Life is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel.” I get what he is saying — certainly a defense against becoming overwhelmed with suffering is a sense of humor.

So no, I didn’t see Manchester by the Sea. And I didn’t read Room. There are a lot of stories about bad and sad that I will not choose for entertainment.

I don’t see life as a comedy. That is simply insensitive. But I don’t see it as wholly tragic either.

What I see, is that we people are a mess.

We have immense potentials for good and for bad.

We don’t have as much control as we think we have.

There are forces at work far beyond our knowing.

There will always be horror; there will always be light.

I try to laugh, love and dance when I can.

Spoiler Alert: This is the end of Little Miss Sunshine — you have to watch to the end.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GkjhhNtW8JY

Wednesday: Questioning the Voice in your Head (Especially the Mean One)

Here's the blog o' the day.  Thank you for taking the time to follow the link and read my work! 

Ways to Question the Mean Voice In Your Head (Especially the Mean One)

Tuesday: Guilt, Anxiety and Breast Pumps - what's up with Parenting?

Hi!  I forgot to post this yesterday, but here it is.  Thank you for reading!

Tuesday: Guilt, Anxiety and Breast Pumps: What's Up with Parenting?

Monday: What I Practice

Thanks again for taking a look and sticking with me through my writing projects.  Here is my latest blog on Medium.  About Practice and Habits.  Monday: What I Practice

Sunday: Is It Time to Adjust?

Hello!  Thanks for visiting my blog - I'm attaching the link to Medium.  This week is a little writing experiment for me.  My blogs are usually about an 8 minute read - I am trying for a week to write little pieces that will be 'thoughts for the day' - about a 2-3 minute read.  Thank you for reading and supporting my writing!

Sunday: Is It Time to Adjust