Honour your loved one : some reflections on the power of annivesaries

I was reading a portion of Louise Hay and David Kessler’s book You Can Heal Your Heart this morning which was discussing the painful anniversaries of a loved one’s birthday or death. They were addressing the running reaction which is where a person does all they can to avoid feeling and grieving the loss, discussing a client they were working with called Adrian. Adrian in time stops running, she takes some time to spend at the grave of the loved one who passed, in this case her mother, and experience the grief and loss fully. In time she is surprised when fewer tears begin to fall and then her feelings of love and even some happier memories begin to sustain and uplift her, Adrian has been able to integrate her pain and move through her resistance.

It really made me think about my sister as I was reading this. I am picking her up in a few hours to take her out and I just thought of the stye on her eye she developed last week and of all the unshed tears I feel she has locked up inside of her. I tried many years ago to suggest that maybe over medicating grief is not the best approach but still she is looking for that magic amount of medication which will make her feel better.

I was thinking too of how my own tears over my father’s loss only began to start to fall about 14 years later, when I had actually been sober for around 6 years. It was close to the anniversary of his diagnosis and rapid death and I remember cycling to my then therapists office in the pouring rain and in her rooms she actually reached out a hand to me across the distance that separated her and held it and then the deluge just started. I was finally beginning to grieve not only that loss but so many other related ones.

Sadly my own therapy got aborted shortly after. As I look back now I understand my own reactions more but at that time I was not able to fully understand all the pain and forces driving me and addiction was the primary way I coped in the aftermath of all our family trauma which reached a water shed with the death of my father. At that time I could not understand everything and how even in the years following my stumbling attempts to reconnect with family at that time fell short. My husband and I went back to Oz around the anniversary of my father’s death but there was little way to speak of and share our loss with family and over the years I really struggled. I am grateful that in time I found a therapist where my loss could be honoured finally along with all my deeply conflicted feelings around my relationship with my father.

I am posting this just as a reminder of how powerful anniversaries are when we have lost love. It may not be a death, it may be a divorce or severing of another friendship. I have just gone through the 15th anniversary of my marriage ending. The loss is much more integrated for me now, I am not blaming myself as much as I used to but I know in past years it has been a very difficult time when I had to do a lot of inner work and grieve as well for what could not be.

In their book Louise and David share how its good to try to find a way to do something that honours our loss around the anniversary of that loss. Some of us will not want to do this, we may wish to be as far away from things as possible. I have a friend who always takes her self overseas around the time of her father’s death. My brother also leaves the country every year just before the anniversary of my father’ s death and in 2017 he had to delay his departure as Mum chose that time to die. I had been trying to point out to him before she died how much Mum and Sue and I would have loved to have been able to share that time with him. That said my brother may not wish for this, at the time he blew me off when I spoke to him about it and sadly Mum got sick two months later and was taken from us very close to the anniversary of my father’s death.

For myself I try now to honour my loved ones and the anniversaries of significance in my life in some conscious way. I know it is not easy to do this in a culture that so often wants to blow this off as maudlin or something, never the less finding some way to acknowledge the depth and sacredness of such a time to our soul and heart to me seems very very important. My therapist often mentions that accidents can often happen on anniversaries if we not that conscious. I don’t mean to be a messenger of doom but I do think the psyche is powerful and our grief is important and has meaning as do all the connections we have experienced in our life. Honouring our loved one, honouring our feelings and honouring the connection is a way of bringing some conscious light into our lives as well as working to let go and deepen because even when connections end on the physical plane deep inside soul connections do endure.