Only those who know

Only those who know the ways of loss and grief can help you through those pathways.. Not being able to speak of our grief is a damage, its something covered in depth in The Grief Survival Guide, this not a book written by an intellectually informed expert but a grief survivor and it was interesting to pick the book up again the other day. I had not read all of it, but after reading about the experience of Betsy in Sarah Krasnostein’s book The Believer its message seemed to be particularly important : Find a way to honor your grief and work through the feelings not by becoming fixated but by opening up your heart to the depth of your loss, try to share your happy memories with someone too, if you have them. Face all of the other feelings around the loss too : fear, guilt, hurt and pain as openly as you can with self love. ❤.

In the book Jeff Brazier reminds us of the saying that grief is just all the love we have for something or someone with no place to go, but that has not been my complete experience around later losses because following them I have directed the love towards my own heart and feelings as well as to the one’s I lost. Even the with those people where part of the grief also lay in the pain of how they hurt me or could not give me the kind of love I really needed from them in life bring able to express that to them and feel the depth of it has helped.

If I tried to go to others with this grief who have no idea of how it feels to go through it I am not going to find the right kind of support for my feelings, something I learned NEVER TO EXPECT due to the emotional desert of my childhood, teenage and younger adult life. Now I know better and when I read painful stories of loss where I see the person is struggling alone or with someone else very locked in grief I feel so much for them.. I want them to know there is a pathway out and through…

If there is one thing I would say to those who struggle with grief out of my own long years of unexpressed and complicated grief. Find a way to. give it expression but seek for those places where your feelings will be validated, the more you can express your feelings the more freedom you will feel. The more you can embrace your feelings and even understand the limitations others display around trying to block your expression the better.. that is about their ignorance and fear or lack of understanding, it may hurt but you should not have to suffer for it.. no one deserves to suffer or struggle with grief alone.

This too is where tools or containers like poetry, journalling, novels and even films portraying grief may help us.. I have a quote to post after this from Maya Angelou’s son that reminds us how we need poets now more than ever to remind us how human it is to feel and to try to express that feeling. No feeling ever belongs in isolation and yet that is what so often happens as we struggle with others whose griefs have gone silent as well as our own.