Trevor,
I’m really pleased that you’ve started the counselling - I’ve had 3 sessions and I’m sure it helps to be able to talk in that way.
You are right - pendulum, rollercoaster or whatever, it is an up and down time and we’ve just got to hope and believe that it will get easier. I can’t believe it’s nearly 3 months since I lost my lovely Hilary… When I’m upset I just try to remind myself that it’s natural, I talk to my wonderful friends and family openly about how I’m feeling, and I remind myself that Hilary would want me to be getting on with my life (I can hear her say it!).
Keeping sharing, be strong.
Best wishes, Simon
Hi.
The last two days have been grim. I’ve done things out of character that is really annoying me, I snapped at a friend over nothing then broke down in tears. The last two nights too have been so empty and hard going, I have a constant splitting headache, its just getting too much.
Hello Trevor G
I am going to totally disagree with a lot of posters to you and give you another perspective to consider which may or may not help but hopefully will.
I tried to push myself to get out and about and go away for short visits/breaks away and all the things that people have suggested.
I had a complete emotional breakdown that hospitalised me and I saw several specialists and one of them a lovely kind lady whose words I will always remember said to me “to heal you firstly have to allow your heart to break and not try to mend it before it’s ready”…that breakdown was horrendus but the best thing that happened to me. Sometimes we just have to allow grief in and sit with it. Death of a loved one is actually a trauma and trying to be “normal” when your mind, heart and body have to adjust to this actually fights against the grief we need to feel.
Focus on just being in the moment and allow yourself to grieve your beautiful Ann. Grief is just an outpouring of love with nowhere to go. Let it flow and let it heal.
Lyn
The hardest part of losing a loved one is letting them go. Love is letting them go and knowing their love and energy lives on in the heart and soul. The pain in grieving is as human beings we resist not being in control. Death we have no control over and the helplessness of that lack of control and helplessness is what causes the pain. You have to set love free to feel it and heal from it and it all takes time. Give yourself that time. Those who pass on also need to move on with love and not be tied to any pain in this life. You will be ok Trevor I promise you
Trevor, I agree with Lyn in one important respect - that you have to allow yourself to grieve, which is a tearful, sorrowful but essential step in dealing with our loss. You shouldn’t feel embarrassed to show you feelings, and your short tempered behave is entirely understandable- I’ve done similar, just apologise and explain what’s going on in your life, everyone will understand. Everything else - what you do, where you go or who you see - is just detail. Use your friends, talk to people, keep on with the counselling - you’ll get there (that’s what I believe sincerely, that’s what keeps me going, that’s what my darling Hilary wanted me to do).
Take care, Simon
Hi Lyn.
I’ve read through your post and have been deep in thought. I understand that I have to let go, how though can you let go when we were so close and virtually did everything together? Annes love does live in me and always will as she refined me into a different and better person than what I was after my controlling mother. I do feel the love that Anne gave me during her short time on this earth but I don’t understand what you mean I have to set love free and heal from it. I think I’m missing something but what? Those that have passed on have moved on and as a Christian (not a strong faith though) I believe they will be resurrected when the earth passes away so they have no connection with the living. This belief is possibly why I am struggling as I often feel Anne is listening to me but my head says she cannot hear me or see what I am doing etc. Perhaps I’m being to complex and should try to come to terms with her passing in a different way.
Very sad and confused.
Hello Trevor
Thanks for replying and I understand both your sadness and confusion. Birth and death is the cycle of life and none of us can stop that cycle. It’s the natural order for all of us.
Death is the physical body leaving this Earth but our spirit lives on. It lives on in those we love and who loved us. When you met your lovely Anne you had a connection and that connection will never leave you.
Death makes us all question our own mortality and our faith and beliefs but the one thing it doesn’t do is separate our love. Love is eternal and love does not equal pain. Letting go is about appreciating that love and counting our blessings for the time we spent with our loved ones and carrying on that connection with them and their legacy and all that they were and their meaning on this Earth in our daily lives. Our loved ones would not want us to be in pain or sad. When they passed they too had to let go of those they were leaving behind in the hope that we will continue on with our lives in love and happiness and to share with the world the love they left behind.
Letting go is about acceptance and not resistence. It is a gradual process and it is a time when you wake up one day and count your blessings they were a part of your life and when your heart swells with love when you think of them. That is the greatest gift we can give or receive.
It all takes time. Grief is only a process. It is not the be all or end. Anne only left you physically and although that is still heartbreaking you can still and always will be able to embrace her love because that was her gift to you. We rejoice in gifts. They don’t cause us pain but we have to look within to find the love and that means being in the moment with no external distractions. Sit quietly, light a candle and listen and feel and you will be in the moment with your lovely Anne and feeling her love embrace you. The world carries on revolving but we have to jump off the wheel and listen to our heart. Let it flow, don’t over feel it or think it. Your are questioning, seeking and looking for answers and that is the beginning of your healing. Your wound is not a scar it is a testament of the love your Anne bought you.
Thank you Lyn.
I understand what you mean now. I certainly appreciate the 31 years we had and how our love grew over those years. Letting go is hard but I know I have to accept that will happen over time. A friend of mine remarried a couple of years after his wife passed away and although he loves his wife he is unable to give the same to her as his first wife who passed away, no one could ever really replace her he says. I find that sad that his “new” wife cannot be loved properly. In other words he has not truly let go. Life is hard and what you have to deal with can be a killer, Anne’s brother lost his 35 year old son in 2006 by suicide and the family including Anne never really came to terms with it.
Hello Simon
Your Hilary would be proud of how far you have come in this journey of grief. I believe it is reaching beyond the pain to the receiving of the love they left us with. I also believe they live on within us and they would not want that to be through pain and heartbreak. Healing is about living with the love and not the loss but first and foremost the mind, body and soul has to adjust and adapt to the part of you that left with them and the new emerging you that has no choice butto continue on this journey of life. Gratitude and appreciation of how temporary it all is keeps us surving
Nobody has a manual for grief. It takes it’s own course but like everything in life we have to make a choice. Either we sink or swim but the wisest choice is to just let life take it’s course and go with it. Survival is natural and we find a way to meet it half way. The choice is in how we react. Nothing will bring our loved ones back. We either face it and deal with it or we bury it or replace it. What we resist will persist. None of this is straight forward because it has no logic to it and our emotions need to be expressed and heard as well as our brain and keeping them all in balance is exhausting
My own way of dealing with it was to hit it head on, rationalise it, bury it, avoid it and rise above it at lall costs but my body was not in sync with my mind and my heart was lagging behind which equalled total nervous and emotional breakdown. I had to claw my way out of the darkest hole imaginable but I had to do it with literally baby steps as I had nothing left to climb out of it with. I had lost the will to live. That breakdown was the making of me and here I am just 6 months later wanting to help others.
Hi.
Today was the second month anniversary of Anne’s passing. I was in a stronger place than last month. Although Anne was firmly in my mind today I actually didn’t feel anyway as bad as I have done over the last few weeks. In fact I got a wee laugh today. Anne kept everything, she has written a yearly diary since I’ve been with her and one with all the birthdays of the grandchildren and family and friends. Something told me there was one imminent so I went into a drawer with all the diaries etc and I found her old purse that she replaced two Christmases ago. In it was some old store cards etc and one was a Blockbuster Video card, that really made me chuckle, it must be years since we rented a VHS film. Oh dear she was a hoarder. She has receipts going back 20 years!!! A better day for me.
Trevor, good to hear you sounding more positive - I know it’s tough. It’s three months on Thursday since my darling Hilary passed away. I am also in a slightly better place - I look at pictures of her now with poignant sadness, not so much the deep and debilitating sadness I have felt before.
Keep positive, prepare for the inevitable bad times but look forward too. Believe that it will get easier.
Very best wishes, Simon
Hello there Trevor. You have made me smile today talking about your wife being a hoarder. I can beat you. My husband kept just about everything and I have found old pay slips from forty years ago, bank statements, ten years old. And in the loft boxes and cases of numerous old photographs of friends from the past as well as of his ex’s, school books belonging to his daughter who is in her fifties now. I also found a wallet with a ticket from when he went to school. This might well be going to the local heritage centre. Having to destroy all this was upsetting as I was getting rid of his past. The loft was full up. I know now why he never wanted to move house.
Hello LynT, thank you so much for giving some of us hope of a future. I hit all the sorting out head on. My husband had so much but I didn’t stop sorting, burning, selling, donating. Friends and family told me how well I was doing. I decorated every room in the house, worked on our two allotments and generally kept busy. Thought I was doing well, even started to get used to my own company. Last week all the sorting came to an end, I had done it. Then I started with a health scare and downhill I went as I have never been ill in my life. Led a healthy lifestyle, so why is my body letting me down now. So bloody unfair. Back to feeling lonely, afraid, in a black hole so this week I feel totally different. I hate my house and life and feel worse now than I did at the beginning of my loss. So here we go again, a molehill becomes a mountain,. Starting at the bottom again. Anyway your post cheered me a little because it might just give me the strength that it can be done. I too would like to help others that are suffering like us.
Hi.
It’s funny to be honest. I have been into vintage Radio & TV since I was about 10. Life was awkward for me as a child as my mother was controlling and very much a religious nut being involved with Jehovah’s Witnesses, Mormons and christadelphian’s over the years, I got away with a pre war radio and an old single channel TV till I started working as a Radio & TV Engineer apprentice in 1970 at 15 and a half. I always kept up the interest of the “old” stuff and I have a big shed with lots of stuff in it and also lots of parts in the loft. Anne used to call me the hoarder but she was just like me, she’d hardly ever throw anything out, even things belonging to her mum and dad have been kept since her mum passed in 2008. I’ve removed a lot of that stuff as the children don’t want it and a lot of clothes were ruined by the heat of last year and being stored in plastic bags. To be fair I will keep the receipts and other things like that for at least another few months when I should be able to go through them and not feel upset as I think I will at this time.
Hi Patti.
You literally have over done things. I’ve not stopped to be honest, I cleared all Anne’s mum and dads stuff out of the loft as I said, continually clean and fix things round the house, so I’m doing the usual DIY plus more cleaning as Anne was fussy and was a hard worker round the house. I’ve been exhausted at times since she passed not just with grief but with physical work too. I now realise it’s not good to go daft with work after a bereavement as its just too much. Take time to rest now an d get back to proper health.
Hello Pattidot
I think we all try to take back control as a way of coping because death throws us totally off balance which is understandable. When your world has fallen apart you grab on to anything to keep you with a foothold on reality. It works as a temporary measure but our mind, body and soul is resisting what just happened to us and to make sense of it all. The body absorbs the shock while the mind fights it and the soul only knows the love that has been wrenched from us. In addition we are scared and the fight and flight mode of adrenaline kicks in. There is no way around it, through it or avoiding it. The hardest part is allowing the acceptance in because that feels like defeat and letting our loved ones down. It isn’t. Acceptance which means letting go is the way we heal and have a healthier bereavement. Take time out and just sit with what you feel and allow it to flow through you. Nuture yourself because you are still here living and breathing and that is the precious gift of life. Rediscover a new you and know that your loved one will still be with you but in this time in joy and not in sadness. Take it minute by minute and hour by hour. There is no rush
Hi.
I’ve just noticed an error on my first post on this thread. I said that Anne had a bad year in 2008 and a Hysterectomy. The year is wrong, it was last year 2018 and the hysterectomy was in January 2018. Sorry about the mistake.
Thank you Lyn, what wise words, you are so right. Trouble is I don’t really know how to relax and your correct in saying that the adrenaline did kick in. I started the day after Brian died and never stopped for months. I thought when it came to an end I was free but that is not the case. My body is letting me down and I am grieving for Brian more than ever not less, so it hasn’t really done me any good keeping occupied. I have never considered myself a scared person but I am. I shall be reading your post many times to really take it in, because I think it’s what I need to try to make some sense of my life as it is now and where do I go next. Once again thank you so much. Pat xxx