No one was on the schedule for tonight and I am on the road at a work conference so I am posting this as an Open Thread for people who want a place to gather.
Please share whatever you need to share.
Participating here is an act of trust between blogfriends who know each other and between people who have never met. We send our needs, our cries for help, our poems of loss and recovery, our honest emotions, out into the blogosphere. We trust that someone reading our words has been in a similar place and truly understands. We trust that someone out there will offer a kind word and stand beside us as we rant and rage about the unfairness of it all. We read without judgment and offer presence, not advice.
We share our experience, strength and hope.
Welcome, fellow travelers on the grief journey
and a special welcome to anyone new to The Grieving Room.
We meet every Monday evening.
Whether your loss is recent, or many years ago;
whether you've lost a person, or a pet;
or even if the person you're "mourning" is still alive,
("pre-grief" can be a very lonely and confusing time),
you can come to this diary and say whatever you need to say.
We can't solve each other's problems,
but we can be a sounding board and a place of connection.
Unlike a private journal
here, you know: your words are read by people who
have been through their own hell.
There's no need to pretty it up or tone it down..
It just is.
Recently a dear friend of many many decades challenged me in the nicest possible way about the stuck place I am in with respect to my grief.
It's true I have been sometimes worried for you, over recent years, that you might be mistaking other kinds of sadness, other kinds of grief, other kinds of depression (there are so many, many kinds and sources of unhappiness in this world, unfortunately) for the grief over losing your mom.
And those who read my TGR posts regularly know that I have been thinking about this a lot in recent years and this year especially.
I don't know whether I am mistaking or misreading other kinds of sadness for grief so much as I feel it is all the same grief. it's all loss. it's all loneliness. it's all emptiness. it's all the absence of love. and some of it is about mom and the reconciliation years that were cut short by illness, and some of it is about other things, but the connection between them feels very real. It's all one big grief.
Like a Venn diagram where "grief" is the rectangular universe and inside it float all the little circles of sadness caused by "other things".
But they are not "other things". Maybe it is one of those alternative spiritual practices where everything is loss: we should not try hold on to anything because the impermanence of life means that everything is always in the process of being taken away from us.
As I write that, my inner hope voice that I call "the unquenchable spark" answers back: yes but it also means that everything is always in the process of coming to us as well...
I am exhausted and dragging myself to the end of a long series of work days at the end of a long series of hard weeks. At the end of this week I come up for air and hope to feel reborn. Burdens lifted, heart refocused, baggage left by the side of the road the better to get the wagon train across the mountain pass. Something to look forward to. It is comforting to know that this recent rough period is going to have, if not an end, then a change for the better, and soon.
In the meantime I drag myself down the street pulling all my losses behind me in a big canvas bag I have marked "grief" on the outside.
I know the bag holds so much more.
But it's the most convenient container to carry all the pain in right now.