Just One Of Those Weeks

 

I’ve been thinking a lot about grief this week. Don’t let me scare you off, I don’t mean this to be morbid. The fact is the intensity of grief comes and goes, and, for me, this week it came. It hasn’t been a year since I lost my sister, so the pain of the loss still is strong. She has been on my mind, where we were year ago, and how a year ago she was still in my world. It’s not easy to let go.

My dad has been gone for twenty years. This week I let go of something I’d been holding on to for all those years. I just couldn’t part with it. A friend shared that letting go of even the little things is like more and more of them disappear, and for me, this really was the last concrete thing.

Yet, he hasn’t disappeared. He‘s still very much a part of my life in how I think and reason. My dad was a great mentor, and who I am today is in no small part thanks to his mentoring. I remember one time him and my uncle feeling a bit sorry for themselves and wondering if they’d made a dent in the world. I was so surprised to hear them talk that way. Their legacy shown all around them, least of which were their children. I reminded them of that. And it’s true, my cousins and my siblings are very much a part of the legacy they left behind.

But I still wish he was here. He was my go to person for life wisdom. I didn’t always like or appreciate his responses, but overall they were pieces of helpful guidance. I miss having him here as a sounding board. My keeping that piece of him didn’t make any difference in that, I just couldn’t let go of it. It wasn’t even really a choice I was aware of; I just held on.

After letting go, though feeling lighter, I still feel sad. Grief is like that. It can come up and pinch you out of nowhere. It can quickly turn laughter into tears.  It’s like a cloud rolling in on an otherwise sunny day. It’s something we all share when someone we love is gone, but we share it differently. And though people will tell you otherwise, grief stays on, never fully going away. It gets better, that I know, but it never leaves.

 It’s also different with each person we lose, which I find very interesting. We have a different relationship with everyone, so it shouldn’t be surprising our grief aligns with that relationship dynamic. We miss what they were to us – mentor, friend, lover, confidant, parent, sibling. And so each loss reflects that. When my mother was dying, my dad pointed out how he saw each of our relationships with her. I was amazed by his insight. We each held a different place for her. It wasn’t like favorites, or best – it was just different. So my loss of mom was going to be different than my siblings because of my place in her life.

Then our own personalities come in to play. Some of us wear our hearts on our sleeves, some of us wear a stiff upper lip. Some of us have to talk about what we are going through to process it. Some of us just want to be left alone. Some of us stuff in our emotions and hope they will just go away.  Some of us seem to get over the worst of it more quickly than others. Some of us make judgements about how long someone seems to be “wallowing in their grief”. That’s the cruelest judgment. Who put a time limit on loss? And who are we to judge another’s process?

This week my sister and my dad were “haunting me”. I call it that because it’s like suddenly they are there, bearing down on my awareness. I know they are both enjoying health and joy in Heaven, so there is no need for them to literally be haunting me. I don’t believe in ghosts as such. It’s me who feels their lack of presence here in my word, not them coming back to bug me. Countless times I want to text my sister and tell her something. I wanted to tell her about letting go of that silly thing this week. And I can’t. I can talk about it here and with my chosen family and friends. I am certainly not alone, I just don’t have her.

My faith gives me peace and confidence that someday I will join them. In the meantime, I’ll have some difficult days and weeks missing them. I view my letting go this week as another step in the 20 year process of grieving my father. That page is finished, but now I turn another. Grief is funny like that.

The family I have lost I loved deeply.  I think that grief shows the depth of that love. We grieve because they were so integral to our life, and now we have to learn to live a different life without them. Change is never easy, and this change in particular because it hurts, sometimes physically. This week was one of those weeks.