Grief 2.0

Grief 2.0

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As I write this, I’m laying in a field of grass at a park near my house. My son is happily playing with some newly made friends a few feet away. A cool breeze dances through the leaves of the trees overhead, creating a beautiful symphony of whispers. I listen to bursts of laughter peppered in the conversations of the kids who have joined together to make the most of their short time at the park before the sun sets and they have to head home.

All of this makes me want to pause and savor this moment.

As adults, we get so caught up in the trappings of work and assumed responsibilities that we often lose sight of what it is we’re actually living for.

Many of us inadvertently end up living to work. We feel pressure to provide our children a better life than what we had. But must do so in a world where the cost of living seems to be on an endless upward trajectory. Society teaches us to define our worth by the importance of our profession and the amount of money we make. We work a ridiculous amount of hours at the expense of quality time with those we love and hold dear.

Many of us try to numb the growing pain and frustration we feel by filling our time with distractions and surrounding ourselves with “things” we think will make us happy. And we hope they will somehow fill the void — oblivious to the fact that the void is caused when we neglect the actual “living” part of life.

It is the part of living that kids instinctively get: making the most of the time left before the sun sets.

Sometimes we are faced with very sobering wake-up calls that point out this void and error of our ways. For most of you reading this, it was the death of someone so dear to you that life as you knew it came to an abrupt end.

While we’ve always known death to be inevitable, we now know all too well that the sun may set long before we are prepared or ready for it. For most of us, that wake-up call caused us to lose our taste for the frivolities of life.

We no longer seem to have the patience for superficial relationships, gossip, or activities that have no apparent point other than filling time. Many of us now crave purpose and meaning in everything we do. For we know that the sun may drop from the sky without a moment’s notice. We want to make the rest of our days count.

Grief does that to us. And yet, after losing someone we can’t imagine living without, we seem to stop living all together. We simply exist.

In its first iteration, grief is too overwhelming to do much of anything except try to get from one day to the next in one piece. We’re still here. Our hearts still inexplicably beat. We somehow still draw a breath. But we remain suspended in our bubble of grief. Not able to touch the world around us that we once knew.

So here we are with a new conundrum. We have seen the error of our past ways. We have realized that life is fleeting and meant to be lived to its fullest, appreciated for the gift that it is, and filled with purpose and meaning.

And yet it still feels impossibly out of reach.

This time, instead of the trappings of work and responsibility, we are trapped inside impossible, smothering pain.

We hear from others who’ve been in our shoes that these intense feelings won’t last. We’re told it won’t always be this painful. It’s just that now is our time to grieve. Now is a time to lean on others for support and guidance. Now is a time to look within. 

There is no timetable for how long this phase of grief should last. Everyone is unique. And so is our individual pace of grieving.

As for me…

It’s been many years since my daughter, Margareta, died. It is only NOW that I finally feel ready to move onto my next phase of grief. Call it Grief 2.0 if you will.

In hindsight, Grief 1.0 for me was all about coming to terms with a life without my daughter in it.

It has been a slow and difficult process. I was focused entirely on how to take my pain and learn how to transform it into opportunities for personal growth. It was about learning what my purpose and passions are. Learning to redefine relationships with those around me. Deciding what “living” really means for me in this new landscape of my life.

And as much as I felt and thought I had come so far over these last few years, I realize now I wasn’t really living yet. Oh…I talked a good talk. Experiencing insight after insight, I was an example of hope to those still in the earliest part of Grief 1.0.

But I hadn’t yet reached the point where I was ready to stop talking about what it means to live and actually start living. 

With various circumstances coming into play, I took a hiatus from writing about grief. My husband pointed out that it had become all consuming to me. I had begun to feel obligated to produce posts on a regular basis and became addicted to looking at how many people were reading and sharing my insights. The more I felt I was helping others, the more I felt my life held purpose and meaning.

But at what expense? At the neglect of the relationships that mean the most to me?

During that time, I took advantage of an opportunity to instead write about how to live your best life — the one you’ve always dreamed of but never knew how to actually achieve. I wrote about ways to overcome all the self-imposed obstacles that keep you trapped and immobilized in a state of fear. Fear of failing. Fear of trying in the first place.

It was an eye-opening experience. Here I was giving other people motivation to take those first real steps towards “living,” and yet I wasn’t doing it myself. The truth is that I hadn’t been ready to.

For me, Grief 2.0 is all about taking what I’ve learned and actually start living this life until my sun sets.

It is about taking action on everything I’ve learned about what it means to truly live. It is about seeking new experiences. New adventures. New ways of improving my closest relationships. It is finding the balance between using my passions and skills to help the greater good while also using them to benefit me, my family, and my friends.

It is about doing all these things while still honoring Margareta and recognizing how she’s inspired this new phase of living. Though I’m not exactly sure what my future path will look like, I finally feel I have the actionable tools and knowledge to explore what lies ahead.

. . .

Back in the park, the sun is beginning its final descent to the horizon where it will soon disappear.

My son and I are about to head home. He has enjoyed his time at the park with his new friends. That he may never see them again does not matter. What matters to him is that he made the most of the time he had while he was there.

And from here on out…that is what I intend to do as well.

Signs From Bill

Signs From Bill

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I lost my ex-husband, Bill, (father to my 3 children) last July 2013. The grief struck me hard. He fought the disease of addiction. The addiction won the battle. He was just so tired and took his life. I too have seen signs via several ladybugs and one dragon fly. I believe wholeheartedly it was him trying to comfort me and let me know he was ok. I found aliveinmemory.org via a search on ladybugs and afterlife. I believe more than ever in life after death now.

 

 

 

 

Remembering Michaela Noam

Remembering Michaela Noam

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Our oldest daughter, Michaela Noam, was a lively, intelligent, beautiful child who has cerebral palsy. She was thriving despite her physical limitations, and she elevated our existence and gave purpose to our lives. She unexpectedly passed away on May 23, 2009 at age 5 and a half, leaving behind not only her devastated parents, but also two younger sisters.

I had been a devoted special needs mother. I have not returned to writing and much of my non-fiction work — essays, memoir — has been published. It all has to do with Michaela. As well, I continue to fiercely advocate on behalf of the special needs population. You can follow me on Twitter @gabriellaburman.

This is a photo of our gorgeous, beloved, delightful Michaela, age 5.
MichaelaKaplanphoto

 

 

 

Submitted by Gabriella Burman in loving memory of her daughter, Michaela Noam Kaplan.

He Was My Everything

He Was My Everything

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Hi,

I lost my husband to lung cancer just two months ago. On 22nd Jan at 3.30 am. He battled with the disease for 3 years. We were married for 7 years. And together for a total of 15. Everything I know and have learnt, is from him. He was my best friend, my boy friend, my husband, my father, mother, my sister and my brother.

Losing him slowly, everyday to the disease was painful, but nothing had prepared me for losing him to death. We were prepared for the inevitable, but nothing can prepare you to live through the inevitable without your partner, who you prepared with… I miss him very single minute of the day and night.

All my memories are with him, of him and about him. From learning to e-mail, or to use the computer properly, way back in 1998. To learning to drive, traveling to different countries, eating all kinds of food. Everything.

All my conversations were always about my experiences with him and about him and us, our life, our love story, our stories. Period. Now I can either just speak about him or not at all. I have no words to talk about anything else other than him. It’s almost like I have re-learn everything, from social graces, to conversation topics, to living my life on my own. Restarting my career. Everything. And every place I visit and re-visit, for real and in my head, it’s all with him.

It’s a process I know, it don’t have an end, and neither does it have a set pattern or map that I can follow. And it is my journey and only mine, alone. I’ve never really done anything without him. But it is nevertheless, my only option. Taking it a day at a time. The only and only philosophy that has helped me so far.

May everyone find their peace, in this journey in some way or the other.

Purva

Submitted by Purva Verma Khanna in loving memory of her husband, Sachin Khanna.

Everyone Grieves Differently

Everyone Grieves Differently

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In the months after my daughter’s death in 2009, I struggled with the notion that others around me didn’t appear to be grieving the “right way.”

Initially, I was frustrated that for the most part, my husband and other children didn’t openly cry or talk about her death the same way I did.

Occasionally, I felt outright angry that they appeared to be knowingly suppressing their pain, or showing signs of depression while refusing my urges for them to go to grief counseling. Despite no spoken requests from them, I took cues from their silence and felt compelled to tone down my own feelings of despair around my family. It made me feel isolated in the place where I thought I should be getting the most support – at home.

Not getting the specific type of support I wanted at home, I desperately looked for it in other places. I read book after book about death and grief. So driven to talk about my daughter’s death and the devastation it brought, I went to grief counselors and support groups. Talking about my unbearable pain seemed to me the only way to survive it.

But even in those settings – while there were many similarities in how we grieved – I still found myself frustrated at the numerous differences.

It seemed the experience of losing a child was different than losing a parent, spouse, or other cherished loved one. But even when I was around other bereaved parents, there were other differences. They included the age of the child when they died, the circumstance of their death, the support systems each person had in place, or the length of time since their child had died.

While I appreciated the opportunity to find some solace in telling my story to all these people, I ended up comparing their grief to my own.

In the beginning, I was doing it to try to figure out the “right” way to grieve; the way that would somehow alleviate my intense suffering. Talking helped, but nobody shared my exact situation. Therefore, no one shared all the same combination of struggles as me. It made me frustrated.

Later in my grief, if I saw where others struggled in areas I seemed to have a handle on, I offered advice. Just like the situation with my immediate family in the early months, I thought I knew what was best for these people. When they wouldn’t follow my advice – despite it being offered in the best of intentions – I found myself frustrated again.

The problem with this approach is that it can unintentionally imply that there is a “wrong” and a “right” way to grieve. But there isn’t.

I can pinpoint the moment when this all became perfectly clear to me. It was while attending a Compassionate Friends conference. During a session, the speaker talked about her own experience of losing her son, and how she grieved differently than both her husband and other son. She discussed studies that showed the typical ways fathers, mothers, and siblings grieve the death of a child (no matter their age). It all confirmed my own experiences.

But then she said something I’d never thought of before. She suggested the main reason we grieve differently – even in the case of a family grieving the same loved one – is because we are not grieving the person. Rather, we are grieving our relationship with that person.

Every relationship is unique. So too is our reaction to losing that relationship. In this example, a father’s relationship with his child is fundamentally different than that of a mother’s relationship with that same child. And neither the mother nor the father can truly understand the relationship their surviving child(ren) had with that same child. You can apply this concept to any family member or friend.

So even if my earlier attempts to find someone who had experienced a loss in the exact same set of circumstances as me had worked, I still wouldn’t have found the solace I was looking for. Even if our circumstances were somehow the same, our relationships with our loved one could never be the same. Therefore, our grief wouldn’t be either.

Ultimately, I’m left with the understanding that what works for me, works for me. It may or may not work for others.

My way of grieving is not “right” and different ways are not “wrong.”

While I still may be tempted to offer advice to others, I have learned not to judge if they don’t take it. My hope still remains that everyone faced with a devastating loss will somehow find their way through it with the support and understanding they need.