Grief will come to you.
Grip and cling all you want,
It makes no difference.

Catastrophe? It's just waiting to happen.
Loss? You can be certain of it.

Flow and swirl of the world.
Carried along as if by a dark current.

All you can do is keep swimming;
All you can do is keep singing.

~ Gregory Orr ~

 

 

This poem was in my inbox this morning.  I've been asked a lot lately how I am doing and this is as good an answer as any I give.  I was trying to explain to someone what this process is like.  How there is no moment, no ritual, no one thing that makes the loss real or heals it.  It is simply a process over which I have no real control.  I can only follow it, feel it, process it as it shows itself to me.  I can't choose when I cry or for how long, when I fall apart and when I am strong.  I can't figure out what is wrong and then do something to make it better.  There is no: do this, then this, then this and then you will be done.  I do know that allowing myself to be fully in the process allows me to heal faster.  And so I immerse myself in the river, allowing it to take me where it will. 

When I went to the first Grief Class at Hospice I was shocked that some of the folks there had lost their loved one a year ago, four years ago, two years ago.  I almost did not go back, I did not want to be them in two years or four.  The therapist told me that those folks where there because they had not done what I am doing.  They had ignored, buried, distracted, medicated the process until it finally overwhelmed them.  For whatever reason I have not been able to do that, I saw no other choice but to submit to the river and follow it where it goes.  And I will try to keep on singing.  I don't see any other choice about that either.  I have to believe in the power of the light, that truly this world is made up of light, that we come from it and return to it.  And so I keep on singing...and swimming.