I just read the most moving post on someone struggling with grief over the loss of her Mum in the approach to Mother’s Day (which comes earlier in the UK) and feeling deeply vulnerable and not knowing if it was permissible or safe to feel sorrow or where to go with it.. Gosh could I relate. I didn’t start to grieve the loss of my father until about 14 years later at 6 years of sobriety and my tears were not welcomed much.. In fact my feeling them was one of the major reasons my ex husband left me.. He lost his Dad to cancer at a similar age my own father died and went overseas alone too as he did not have an emotionally available mother. We met and married about 7 years later and then I got sober and at 6 years the grief started to emerge and I came back and forward from the UK and to Australia about three or four times from then on trying to work it through. He broke up with me when I would not stop therapy and facing my feelings.
In the painful aftermath I had a sinus operation rather than grieve. I developed breast cancer, rather than grieve, I had a head injury rather than grieve.. I have been bullied when I tried to grieve in the next relationship and shamed. But the thing was I also attracted partners WITH SO MUCH ANGER AND GRIEF but sadly they could not go there. So being alone has been necessary but painful in order to find a way to grieve.
I recently grieved a lot watching the movie Haitchie on the loss of a pet, when I shared with a friend who recently lost her dog she told me she could not bear to watch it as it would make her feel her sadness. On one level maybe she was right to try and stay out of sorrow? I do not know. I just know that now I am trying not to fear my sorrow will as totally capture me as it used to.. There are still times I can be dragged down into its depths, at this time not only feeling my own but the truth is that if I let myself fully surrender to it in time those sad feelings do pass and transform and I can feel happy again, happier than if I never made the effort to face and feel them.
Today my living sister was very much on my mind, its about 3 weeks since we spoke by phone and she was needing clothes. I tried to find a way to search things out for her and let her know I could take her but she needs the clothes bought to her and I cannot visit the hospital as I am not vaccinated and so we are apart again but the thought I had today was of how much pain she is still trapped in and cannot break free of due to refusing necessary mourning.
Mourning is not about self pity, its not about being ungrateful, its about opening to the depths of our heart.. That said, these days I am such a firm believer in the afterlife and the belief in the souls of our loved ones and ancestors living on in spirit that I no longer need to mourn as deeply but at the same time I can acknowledge what a long and infinitely lonely battle I had to come to terms with both my own grief as well as the deep and tangled roots of ancestral grief.
These days, happily I can laugh more, I can joke more, I can see the funny or ironical side more.. The more I have owned my anger and rage over my feelings not being received well or tenderly the better I can feel and I can also know when I am in the presence of a wall. This is a person who has erected a steely defense against their own inner vulnerable feelings. If that person tries to shame me I need no longer take that on.. Last week in standing up to that man who wanted to make me responsible for his daughter I took a huge step forward.. Often my empathy would entrap me, attracting me to situations that were not my responsibility at all.
Today I can have compassion for a person knowing that their struggle is their own, not mine to fix since I am not God and that taking over control inappropriately would just stop them facing something they need to face, as my sister needs to face feelings she cannot due to being too highly medicated.. and this is where the serenity prayer comes in.
God grant me the serenity
To accept the things I cannot change
Courage to change the things I can
And the wisdom to know the difference.
Emerging From The Dark Night 