To all the lonely lost souls on this site I wish you the best that 2017 can bring you.
For most there will be huge milestones to reach and great sadness to overcome but strength and comfort in abundance in these pages. I have saw wonderful support and real connections between it’s users and have personally drawn from and feel encouraged by that.
No words can eradicate the misery of grief but some people can sum it up in a sentence and others have such sound advise and it is truly humbling to see the kindness shown by many who have their own pain to burden.
A heartfelt thanks and the warmest of wishes to you all…
Thank you for such a beautiful sentiment, Pepper. I just want to add my thanks to everyone out there in the Sue Ryder community, especially to those who have communicated with me recently–and I wish you all the fortitude, courage and peace that will help you all through the year to come.
I have been through a wierdy patch of late–hope I have not worried anyone out there? if I have I am so sorry! Depression, anxiety combined with loneliness and grief can hit that way I understand.
Spent it quietly last night and today…not a sound from anyone–good and bad in someways. 2017 crept in with the accompaniment of Kenny Burrell’s jazz music on CD: not a bad way to celebrate.
I just hope that our pain becomes a little more bearable in 2017.
so to end on a silly note: Happy Newt Ears (I didn’t know that newts had ears???)…What do you expect from a depressed dyslexic?
Thanks so much for this lovely post and for your good wishes to all our users. It is wonderful to hear that the site has helped you and that you have seen such positive support here.
Anniversaries, once the best of times, become the worst of times and the New Year is one of the worst because it signals another year gone by without your loved one.
In is particularly harrowing in the case of our family: my darling Christine went into intensive care on Christmas day and didn’t come out alive. She passed away on January 18. So we have two awful anniversaries within three weeks, followed shortly afterward by her birthday in February.
Last New Year’s Eve, 2016, the first since her passing, brought the blackest day I have known in my 84 years. I didn’t want to go on and had given up on life when, almost like a message from her, I realised that Christine would be cross at my attitude, my surrender. So I saw sense and that’s the moment I reached acceptance, knowing that she was gone forever and was no longer suffering.
This state of acceptance is the key. Until reaching this point I believe most of us are waiting for our loved one to return; we are lost in our grief, unable to function normally. Then, with acceptance, we know that death has won this battle, as it will with all of us. Until then life must go on as best as we can make it. But the anniversaries serve as constant reminders of our mortality. I still hate New Year, though.
Bazzo, this must be such a hard time for you and you must be feeling it is relentless at the moment.
I know you feel that you have to keep going through this but you’ve got through Christmas and New Years you just need to draw strength to get through the next big milestones. Life is so hard sometimes isn’t it? You are so right, it is the anniversaries that are hard and overwhelming. It brings you back to where you were when you lost your loved one (My Mum, Your Christine). I know I just couldn’t cope coming into Christmas as it was our first without Mum and would have been her Birthday on that day. I got through it though as hard and sad as it was.
Sounds like you had a long life with your beloved Christine, you must have such wonderful memories. Hold on to them, so precious and will hopefully make you smile again.
Thank you, Pepper, for your kind words. This is one untold aspect of bereavement, isn’t it, the way people who are strangers come together at such times. It’s a great help. It reminds me of the lovely Irish saying: “you come here as a stranger but you leave as a friend.”
Yes, Christine and I were together for 44 years and married for 43 of them. She was 15 years my junior, which makes her passing even more traumatic because we had tacitly assumed I would go first. But at least she didn’t have to suffer the grief that I have known. It’s a consolation after a life-long love affair. It was love at first sight (in Sydney, although we’re both Brits) and we were together from the very moment we met. We agreed that “it was written in the stars.”
I take some comfort from a line I read recently: “Grief is love with nowhere else to go.
and we all know that love never ends…”
Grief is love with nowhere to go, that statement has such lovely sentiment. I have had the inscription “To live in the hearts of those we love is not to die” put on my Mum & Dad’s headstone. This touched me when we lost Dad and I keep repeating it to myself. I know they knew how loved they were.
All we can do is keep their love in our hearts, pain doesn’t need to be the memory but its all we have until fonder times come to mind. The good times and the good fortune that we had the love of our lost ones is a true blessing in itself.
I know I am getting better, I’ve turned a huge corner this past month. You have too and just need to go a little further on your journey. The hurt remains but coping with it does become more bearable.
Yes we are all strangers with a strange friendship bonded by a common burden. I have found this site to be invaluable. I know I am not going off the deep end if I have bad days and I know there is a connection out there with someone feeling just like me. It has been comforting to reach out to them. You’ll find that and feel free to join in discussions when you do. Good sound advise and support from that.
Warmest of wishes, don’t get overwhelmed, keep talking, it helps…x