Playful Perspectives

Grief April 14, 2011

For the past few days, I have woken up with such sadness in my heart.  Yesterday morning tears trickled down my face, and I longed for a different feeling.  I didn’t understand what my body was telling me, in fact I thought the pain was about something entirely different.  I used some coaching techniques to ‘shift’ the place where I was, to somewhere else.  And yet this deep pain just kept coming back.  And I was longing for a different life, to be someone else, somewhere else, because there in that pit of emotion, you want to be anywhere but here.  However, there is also a numbness that comes with this discomfort.  It is hard to motivate yourself to do anything, a longing to be somewhere else and yet an inability to move.  And also there is a reluctance, or reticence to talk to people about it, because of the fear perhaps that they won’t get it, or they want to fix it, or they won’t honor the feeling you have.  Equally I have a longing for someone to see me, to notice my grief, to ask into it, to understand, to be with me in it, and to hold me.

I was asked yesterday well what do you want to do about this?  I didn’t want to do anything, I was stuck and yet the only thing I could think of doing was going through the mountains of paperwork that have built up over several months.  Strangely enough this was exactly the process I needed to do.  Eight different piles of paperwork,  I am a starter, so in fact it was easy to get going on this, gradually sifting through the piles and putting them into various categories.  Then I got bored, heaps of different papers, and some obscure piles that I didn’t know what to do with, overwhelm, and the last thing I wanted to do was finish the job.  Arghh… can’t someone come and finish this for me?   With a little encouragement I stayed to finish the process off.  And once again the paperwork was clear.  It was a relief, something about staying to finish what I started, and yet it didn’t seem quite complete.  Of course, there was a mountain of papers hidden in my desk that needed attending to, if I was really going to call this job complete.  And of course, in amongst those papers were perhaps the very thing I had been avoiding.  Photographs and letters from my Nana.  As I started to sift through my drawer, the tears just kept pouring and pouring down my face.  My Nana, died six months ago,  my father two years before that, and tucked away in a file somewhere near my stomach is the file named grief.

Grief is such a strange beast, because it seems to me it doesn’t necessarily present itself as a longing for, missing of, the person who has gone.  Naturally when someone dies, life doesn’t stop, and so you get on with the world that you are in now, not the world you were in, when that person was alive.  And, sometimes you don’t or feel you can’t get on with your life… I guess we all have different strategies.  So when a sadness or low level energy comes in, you don’t necessarily associate it with the loss or grieving process.  Perhaps you think that you have been through that process.   Perhaps you don’t want to use the grieving process as an excuse for why you are not feeling on top of the world.  Perhaps you are guarding yourself subconsciously from ‘going through’ the pain of loss and bereavement.  At Christmas I realized that you can set intentions to do things differently for all those things that you may be less than satisfied with in your life, but you can’t do anything about loss, you have to be with it.  And so yesterday, the file was opened.   And in a way as I opened that file, I actually created more space for myself.  I wasn’t consumed by more pain, but some was released.