Bored Through and Not Around the Mountain
Years ago I wrote a post titled “Please Do.” I’ll have to title this one differently. I realized while writing another post that I have things to say in a short but new way. So, here they are.
Please take your time caring for yourself in the grief process. Don’t rush the process because it will mess with your mind.
Please understand that while this is hard, and I’ve said before that grief done well isn’t for wimps, it will go as needed.
Please understand that you will never get over this person: you will get through the process. Please hold on to that thought.
Please understand that while your contacts list may change, the people who need to be in your life will remain, and new people will show up for you in ways that are helpful.
Please, if at all possible, don’t make any major life decisions for one year. Death is traumatic. Give your brain time to sort itself out.
Please allow yourself time to miss your loved one, and take your time entering into new relationships. There’s a good reason for this. After their death, you have a freedom that you didn’t have while this person was alive. You now can fully and completely autopsy the relationship. A good look postmortem will give you insights into the relationship as nothing else will, and you may decide that there are things that you don’t want in your next relationship. You can’t decide this if you’re too busy finding someone else.
In the almost ten years since Jon’s death, I’ve seen more than one person I know rush into something, and then crash and divorce. Too late, a second relationship goes bust. This is also true of divorce.
Please honor your own needs. No matchmaking do-gooders allowed! The last thing you need is that kind of mess.
Please accept help in the beginning of the process. You’ll be glad you did as long as people also give you the space to test what you can, and can’t, handle. In the beginning it is easy to become overwhelmed. There can be a tendency for high levels of dysfunction to set in. The living space can go; your sleep is all messed up; your diet becomes a non-diet. Say yes to meals, and let people know what you can’t eat. Also, eat with others. Eating with others will keep you honest.
Please get professional help if you need to. Find a competent therapist who knows more than what one can read in a book when it comes to grief.
Please remember that there is no right or wrong way to do this process. The day after Jon ended his life, I would have told you that everything I thought I knew about grief was being tossed out. I got a new playbook. While there are some common threads, each process is individual.
Please understand that the crazy tears of the passing will fade in time; slowly, the quality of the tears will fade. As time moves forward, honor the tears that do come.
Understand that bringing someone new into your life will not wipe out the love that you held for your deceased partner.
While time can take the edge off the pain that a loss leaves us with, it is living honestly and facing the reality head-on that enables us to do the real work of grief. This blog is filled with posts about my process and what I’ve learned from going through it, and not around it. I think that the greatest life lesson I learned from going through the suicide and its aftermath is that as painful as it’s been, I’ve learned things I needed to know. I suppose that in many ways, and after ten years, I really do see gifts on my end. I get how strange this might sound. There are things I miss. Our conversations were incredible, and I’ll never have that with anyone else in just the same way. On the other hand, the violence of bipolar will not be missed. His death enabled me to discover who I am in new and powerful ways.
Given the fact that he is no longer suffering, and I’m a much different person than I was in 2016, I’ll keep things the way they are. I’ve bored through the mountain. Life is good on this side of things.
