A Plug for Journaling

Dear Friend,

I sit in my home office thinking of love.  Of two trees entwined together, growing and living and supporting each other -- even beyond death.  Because when our physical bodies die, something else happens to them. They go somewhere else, they exist somewhere else. Where? Does it matter? All that matters is they are not with us anymore.

And it hurts.

Really badly.

How do we make the pain stop? Do we really want it to? Will that mean they are less real to us -- our dead loved ones? Will that mean we didn't really love them if we can somehow manage to "move on"?

When my husband died, my whole reality split apart. I didn't know who I was anymore without his anchor. I didn't fit in with my friends and even my family anymore, because they were mostly his. Friends he'd made before me, the family he was raised with. Not mine. I didn't belong with anyone.

And I was pregnant.

And 25.

The only widows I knew of were old.

I went to the bookstores to connect with anyone in print that had experiences like me. I found two books that helped. Not exactly a resource list.

My friends and family loved me and helped me in ways that they knew how:  bringing food, providing childcare, listening, checking up on me, inviting me over for dinner so I didn't eat alone. But they all had lives of their own, and grief that they had to process as well. I couldn't expect them to help me with mine when they had their own to work on.

And so the support dwindled. Not out of well-meaning "you should be over it by now"'s, (though there were a couple of those) but just because it dwindled. People started picking up the pieces of their own lives that they'd put on the shelf to help me and about three months after the death of my husband, I started looking outside.

I looked for someone or a group of someones to help me through my grief where my family and friends left off. And I thankfully did.

I used to cry in the car where no one could see me -- though I found that not particularly safe, as I couldn't see well through the tears. I discovered that group work, at the time, wasn't for me. I wasn't ready to share my story with a group yet and I wanted to work one on one with someone I trusted. 

Journaling was a lifeline for me and I could not have lived through my grief, let alone grown through it, without my journaling. Journaling became a way to meditate and connect to whoever was listening and carrying me through my pain. I didn't know any gods to pray to, I didn't have the support structure of a church or congregation where I belonged. It was just me and my writing.

I found that I was ready to talk about three or four months after Rob's death. But that may be different for you. Everyone grieves differently and on a different time table.

Feel free to comment here or send me a private email if you need some direction.