Get Over It

One has to realize that grief recycles, that we can go along in our ordinary life and suddenly grief trips us up.  I still grieve the baby boy I lost in 1986--so strange to think he would have been thirty years old now.  I will go along in my life and find something: an old journal from that time, a hospital bracelet, and for a short time, the tears fall.

I came across some things m. gave me tonight, a copy of the Course in Miracles (which I've never finished--for some reason, I still find it difficult to read after a certain point), cards, a few things I had tucked away and then found today as I was sorting (I am trying to get rid of things and move some more stuff to my Lompico house).  It was not a mistake to look at these things (and of course I will never get rid of them), though the tears cascaded out.  I have some pictures of his family and looked at them too, the family I so wanted to be a part of...and was, for a little while.  That is probably, partially.,why the trauma has been so great for me: I have very little family of my own left, and what is left has fragmented and will really not come together again. We meet as a group at funerals and say,"We should see each other more often." In most of my relationships, there was no close family at all, or people who did not accept me.  My time with m. was the first time I felt I belonged, anywhere in the world. I am grateful for the kindness and contact with which so many of them still gift me.

Grief is good.  I don't mind being deeply personal in this blog.  People grieve like this, and often some ass tells them, "Just get over it!"  I think grief is more like one's life proceeding, gradually with less pain, but there are lacunae which hold our memories of that person, the good and the bad, and there are times we stumble across them.  I hope my words help people to know that it is okay to have the grief recycle, to feel like the past is here again for a little while. Perhaps it is some consolation to know that we carry all of it inside us, always.