Making our way through the fog:

For many of us, as we’ve talked about before, the beginning of our grief journey happens in a fog. The early days, weeks and months especially, are times when our grief is mostly in control of our lives and we are just being pushed from moment to moment and thing to thing, often with little or no thoughts or control of our own. 

As time passes and our grief begins to become less demanding, we are faced with the daunting task of taking control of our lives back into our hands; of finding reasons to do so and of learning to make (good) decisions and chart new directions. Here are some things to think about over the next two or three meetings.

As an affirmation to start, please remember that no matter how it may feel at times, you’re not going crazy! Everything is ok to think and feel in our grief, but it’s not necessarily ok to act upon.

With that said, please remember that negative thoughts and places can exist in grief. Please try to turn away from them. Don’t get stuck dwelling on them and don’t embrace or act on them just because they do come into your mind. Please consider finding help to do so if you can’t do it on your own.

Again, many of the things going through our minds during our grieving, especially in the “fog” of our early grief, may sometimes have us doubting our sanity. They may be so outside our normal experiences and ways of thinking and acting that we wonder if we will ever be able to, or want to, function or think clearly or “normally” again. 

Most of these difficult and odd things however, are direct effects of our grief. The good thing is that, like the waves of grief and the level of emotional pain and sadness we experience early on, many of the more uncomfortable things we experience in our grieving tend to become less common and less severe over time as well. 

The Piñata effect:

It’s possible that grief acts like an “emotional stroke” where our thinking and emotions and feelings are disconnected from their normal pathways by the trauma and pain we have experienced with the passing of our loved ones. As with a physical stroke, we are, in a sense, debilitated for a time until we are able to re-train ourselves and find new pathways for our thoughts and emotions to accommodate and facilitate the changes and the new ways of thinking and feeling that our grief has brought us to.

To help me understand those types of disconnected and disoriented thoughts and feelings when I was experiencing them, I called what was happening to me the Piñata Effect…

Think of a piñata, that’s our mind, the stick that hits it is our bereavement. The stick strikes us in the moment of our loved ones passing and within a short time, everything inside, like the things inside the piñata, seems to tumble out of place, maybe onto the ground. If you try to pick it all up off of the ground and put it back inside the piñata in it’s original place, it probably won’t go back in the way it came out. Things will get jumbled and twisted and some may not go back in at all. You may find you have some  “extra parts”…. Or maybe it may seem that you don’t have enough parts….

In our minds, after things “tumble out” particularly during the disruptions of our   earliest grief, we may not even recognize what is going on or what is happening to us in the fog it causes because it’s all so different now. Things are in a different order, they are often not familiar to us and our normal thinking processes are disrupted and maybe even unrecognizable at times. 

So it’s not surprising that we can be confused or disoriented or sometimes unable to do even simple tasks we easily used to do until we find ways to reorder and realign our thoughts and feelings in a new way to accommodate what has happened in our minds and in our lives.

Giving a shit! 

Onward through the fog…

With all of these possible disruptions in our thoughts and feelings, in this new strangeness, it can sometimes be very hard to find the will to care about much of anything at all. We may begin to doubt that there is a good reason out there for us to even bother to try. Sometimes it may be that the realities, disruptions and disorientations from what has happened in our lives bring us to places where we just don’t seem to care anymore.

As we look at our shattered lives, at the loss of not only our love and our loved ones but seemingly of our futures as well, we sometimes can’t see a reason to look toward the future at all. 

It’s sometimes hard, if those feelings take us over, to not descend into some pretty heavy hopelessness and see no reason to do much of anything. We may not see it coming and we may not even recognize it for what it is when it happens.

But it’s important to remember that since we are not our grief, it may well be our grief and grieving that makes us feel that way. 

While we sometimes can’t see much reason to face and do the myriad of tasks, chores and responsibilities of living now that we are alone, part of the hope in hope and healing is that we will slowly learn to do those things despite our despair and loneliness; that we will slowly learn the skills and tasks it requires for us to go on living. And that we will also actually learn to care that we learn them and that we do them.

It’s important to hold on through those bleak times, through the “winter of our grieving”, to do the work and to move forward in small steps as we can. It is important to slog through the snow no matter how tired we feel and how hopeless it looks.

And one day, out of seemingly nowhere, we may see a small fire burning in the distance that we can head toward, embrace and allow it’s heat and light to begin to warm us and heal us; to let us find the strength within ourselves to survive, and not just to survive, but to begin to grow and live again. 

It is important to do whatever it takes to build healing within our shattered hearts, emotions, futures and lives. Our loved ones would want us to do so. As we’ve talked about often, with time, the waves of grief become less high. They also come less often and we start to be able to catch our breaths between waves. In the same way, the hopeless thoughts and days also come less often. We can slowly move from grief being in control of our lives to beginning to let healing in.

Further along, if not the sun, we can at least begin to see the light behind the clouds and the promise that some day, some time, some how, the clouds might actually part and some light will come back into our lives. We can begin to feel that the storm will finally pass and that gentle, calming swells of life will replace the intensity and turbulence of our grief. We can start to live again and begin building the next part of our lives with intent.

Picking up the pieces, taking on the tasks and going forward anyway: Just a few material world things and a few mental/emotional things to consider:

There has always been a list of things to do in our lives but now, while that list continues, we often have little or no energy or interest to get up and do them. But, all the material tasks and jobs and repairs and that endless-seeming list of things life always gives us to do must now be done by us, on our own. If we don’t do them, they don’t get done. If we don’t know how to do them, we may need to find and be willing to accept help to do them. Especially in the fog! We will talk more about this at the next meeting.

We can also find endless reasons to not do things too, including not really caring whether they get done or not. As we’ll talk about later in this series of discussions, it’s a time when our grief can bring us thoughts like: I can’t, I don’t want to, I don’t know how, I won’t, and it’s too hard, and those thoughts can take us over and keep us stagnant if we let them. Alternatively, we may keep so busy with distractions, that we don’t find time for the things we really need to do.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we can come to see that we now have a responsibility to ourselves and others to maintain our material world. We have a responsibility to keep the material world needs of our lives moving forward and not allow them to stop or atrophy or deteriorate and fail because we can’t find the energy or will to do them or we are so busy diverting ourselves from our grief that we are not doing the things we really need to be doing. 

As an extension of that, most of us probably aren’t in a position to replace the major material things in our lives because we didn’t take care of them in one way or another. And if we weren’t the one doing things before, we eventually have to learn to do all that stuff too and we eventually have to be the onesto do them no matter how we feel. 

There are a lot of people out in the world who never had a spouse or partner to share those responsibilities with and they learned to take care of business without someone to share it with! We can too…

Finding the energy, self confidence and will to take on those responsibilities and then getting them done, are all very difficult things to accomplish but are also very important parts of the reconstruction we have ahead of us. More next time…

Questions: 

• Have you felt hopelessness while trying to see a path going forward or of finding a way of dealing with the changes in your lives?

• Can you find ways to go forward despite feeling hopeless sometimes?

• How might you begin to overcome hopelessness if you are feeling it?

• Do you think your responsibility to others can be an important component of the healing process?