@Greeneyedlady21, My heart goes out to you and to everyone here.❤️ The comments on this thread are wonderfully perceptive, caring, and warm. There's so much I could write about grief -- I apologize for the length of this post. My first encounter with the death of someone close to me was when I was 16 years old, first losing a classmate who passed away on the football field in front of our tender eyes and the next year a jarring loss when my beloved father passed away. Many others after that, too many to mention.
My experience usually has been that the first year which marked special days, events, anniversaries, can be the most difficult. It helped me to follow my therapists' advice to "make new memories" at those times and places keenly associated with my loved ones, to use those times and places to celebrate the joy of that person's life and embrace the memories but to weave them together with new traditions or activities. And, to keep reminding myself that my loved ones would want me to find a way to live in joy and abundance, even though it's different type of joy and abundance since we can't help but be forever changed. For me, it honors their memory to find ways to live well, even though it's really a struggle sometimes and I don't want to minimize that fact.
I often contributed to a very old Q thread called "Delayed Grief." I want to post something from that thread, as I think it helps us remember to be mindful when looking at the Kübler-Ross stages of grief, since they can be enormously helpful but they aren't a firm, fixed measure -- they're only a basic reference to help us try and recognize the dizzying array and waves of emotions. This long article also goes into other facets of the grief process. This is a small excerpt:
"...Perhaps the stage theory of grief caught on so quickly because it made loss sound controllable...
...Though Kübler-Ross captured the range of emotions that mourners experience, new research suggests that grief and mourning don’t follow a checklist; they’re complicated and untidy processes, less like a progression of stages and more like an ongoing process -- sometimes one that never fully ends.
Perhaps the most enduring psychiatric idea about grief, for instance, is the idea that people need to “let go” in order to move on; yet studies have shown that some mourners hold on to a relationship with the deceased with no notable ill effects. (In China, mourners regularly speak to dead ancestors, and one study has shown that the bereaved there suffer less long-term distress than bereaved Americans do.)
At the end of her life, Kübler-Ross herself recognized how far astray our understanding of grief had gone. In “On Grief and Grieving,” she insisted that the stages were “never meant to help tuck messy emotions into neat packages.” If her injunction went unheeded, perhaps it is because the messiness of grief is what makes us uncomfortable.
Anyone who has experienced grief can testify that it is more complex than mere despondency. “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear,” C. S. Lewis wrote in “A Grief Observed,” his slim account of the months after the death of his wife, from cancer.
Scientists have found that grief, like fear, is a stress reaction, attended by deep physiological changes. Levels of stress hormones like cortisol increase. Sleep patterns are disrupted. The immune system is weakened..." (from newyorker.com/magazine/2010/02/01/good-grief)
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Dear (((greeneyedlady))). I'm glad you're talking with a grief therapist, yet it sounds as if she's not providing you with useful referrals for additional support. Please keep looking. You will find gems and pearls, treasures and jewels, in each person's comments and experiences here on the forum and also in your life that will help you and that will speak to you.
Remember, you are your dear mother's legacy, and you carry her light, her essence, her beauty and her spirit forward as the holder, the teller, and the keeper of her story. You genuinely are not alone. My love to you.❤️
Few things reveal your intellect and your generosity of spirit—the parallel powers of your heart and mind—better than how you give feedback.~Maria Popova
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