Today is my Grandma Fern’s 102nd birthday. Fern died on August 21, 2015. She’d been diagnosed with metastasized ovarian cancer maybe six months prior. Fern lived until the end, fully and with her spit-fire spirit intact. She was still bouncing along the Crook County roads in her manual transmission pick-up truck until months before her death.
The grieving of her has become less like the Pacific Ocean and more like the gentle lapping of the Aegean Sea; not so scary, intense or cold, but more gentle and soft and the water stays clearer now.
I can count on both hands (and maybe my feet!) the number of people I know who are in an acute state of grieving, right now. Facing our and others' mortality illustrates for us the reality that grief is a foundational part of life; I wonder if that’s part of our impulse to evade the topic of death and dying. We know it hurts and we don’t want to feel hurt, it’s uncomfortable, ungrounding and unpredictable.
For whom/what are you grieving? A person, a fur baby, a relationship, an idea, a worldview? It’s all around. We are not alone. You are not alone. Reach out. Talk. If someone reaches out, listen.
Resources
I Lost My Dad. These Are The 7 Words I Wish I'd Never Been Told At His Funeral.
https://www.huffpost.com/entry/death-grief-words-dont-say-funeral_n_63c6e8a1e4b0d6724fd142bd
Grief support groups (free) through the NM Grief Center, Center for Hope and Healing (where I volunteer), https://griefnm.org/
The Grief Support Network: https://griefsupportnet.org/
The Good Grief Project: Dedicated to understanding grief as a creative and active process
https://thegoodgriefproject.co.uk/
Reimagine: Reimagining loss, adversity, and mortality into meaning and growth: https://letsreimagine.org/
Books:
Healing After Loss: Daily Meditations for Working Through Grief by Martha W Hickman
The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O'Connor
