To absent friends “my father, would always toast when we were together.
Last year we made the toast for him. Grief is one of those emotions, which we do not overcome but maybe we get through and sometimes through is the only direction we can choose.
Grief for me is personal, and in my blogs I have talked about health, physical and mental. To me grief is one of those emotions that can get such a strong hold of you, it may not ever move out of your heart. And I think it is important to be aware of that danger as you let it in, know that it too will also have be said goodbye to as you have said goodbye to a loved one. What is personal about it is that you and only you know when that time has come.
We grieve when we lose people close to us, not always as a result of death but also as a result of divorce and breakups or lost friendships and we can also grieve loss of health. Some comes as a shock, others sneak in on us slowly and we get to prepare and still it is difficult, when life as we knew it, no longer is there.
Someone once told me “life is like an old folk dance, where you stand in a circle and you move around holding different people’s hands. The thing is that you have to let go of one hand to be able to get hold of another”.
I often think of this analogy, it does not comfort me, because there are people who are not in this world any more, that I would have preferred to still be able to dance with but I had to let go. And on the other hand I guess the beauty of it is, that you are still dancing.
When we lose people close to us, It is not my experience that we get over it, some losses we never do. We learn to live with their absence and their presence only in our memories. And as my dear “sister-friend” (I hope you also have friends so close to you that they feel like family) said to me when my mother passed away: “Even though it does not feel like it now, there will come a day when you can talk about your mother and think about your mother without the sadness, as well”. And she was right. I think of that as getting through the grief but I wouldn’t say it is getting over it.
Sometimes the space that the person has left behind is so big that it may not ever be filled again and you are left with all the questions, wanting to make sense of it all, but there are no explanations. That is when you dig deep, find comfort, even if it is just for a split second and you carry on.
I have been to too many funerals; one was for someone as young as 10 years old, another as old as 98 years old and many ages in between. Some were close to me, others, were close to friends of mine. They all touched me and reminded me of the importance of LIFE.
I hope you are as happy as you want to be and remember it is free to be nice.
Best wishes,
Ivalo