You are lucky you can cry : some reflections on grief

This is a post I wrote a while ago. A lot I write never makes it out of drafts.

It was a lovely thing to have my sister say to me today, it really was but it did make me sad for her. Sad to watch the number of meds she has been on for so, so long. And sad to remember how hard I fought for after she tried to take her life and they questioned me why she was on ‘anti-epilepsy’ medication… I nearly screamed down the ICU that day and they took me aside into a room and listened while I said I was a sober alcoholic and of the history in our family with my other sister. They did take her off that medication thankfully.

This is not an ‘anti’ meds post. It is a pro feelings post. So if you are on meds and they work for you and help you to feel your feelings that is great and I perhaps should at times be softer and less against them since in time as I age I may start to need them. Never the less it was good to get the affirmation today that feelings are okay and that it is okay to feel sad around grief and difficult, painful, sad circumstances.

My sis and I were also talking about how hard it is in this culture to get permission to grieve. We all do grieve differently and there is no one right or wrong way to do it. Our grief is complex and has deep roots. A loss that affects someone profoundly maybe less so for someone else due to their history. And all of this needs to be taken into account before we judge ourselves or anyone else for the way they react in grief. Grief is also due to our level of acceptance or non acceptance of endings. We can be resistant to feeling that a loss makes sense or ‘should be’, never the less the cold hard fact is that it happened and we have to find a way to adjust to it. That said we can also chose to live in denial and find support or connection via reverie or imagination or intuition or through poems or drawing or groups, whatever it is that most feeds our soul in the circumstance. Some of us may be wish to be held and comforted while we grieve, some of us may wish to be out on a boat all alone in the wide open spaces with no one and nothing but a breath of wind around us, feeling our connection to spiritual source. (Like my ex partner and one of my nephews).

Some of us carry our grief quietly and silently. Some of us need to shout and scream it out. We each have our process. Acceptance means we find a way to engage with it when we need to and let it go when we need to. Its not a process anyone else can dictate, they may make suggestions and for different motivations, but in the end for me it feels good to cry. When I cry I acknowledge something hidden deep and carried in side and with the tears I shed and release some of that profound charge. When I am told not to cry I feel upset and angry, that is just because of how I am wired and I am learning to accept that too. However today it was good to be told “its lucky that you can cry”. 🙂 I thank God for it.