…frankly, “I miss him” just doesn’t cut it. That’s like a desperate, starving person saying, “I guess I wouldn’t mind a little snack.” When I say, “I miss him,” it makes me snaky inside because those limp, colourless words in no way reflect the enormous scope or the complex detail of what I feel. So I keep trying…
Been thinking about losing a loved one this week…having multiple conversations with various folk over the agonizing, wrenching pain of knowing you will never see a dear family member again on this earth…and finding myself coming back to this blog entry…
His death means literally thousands of big and small things, and I have to learn them one by one.
Shannon Unruh, a woman who lost her husband, Ramsy, last year to cancer, compares grief to various experiences in the rest of life, realizing the enormity and the layers of grief…the facets and angles of pain that catch one by surprise or linger for months like a headache that throbs mercilessly in the background during the day to day of life.
Grief comes in
- waves,
- aches constantly,
- stabs acutely,
- numbs other parts of life,
- changes the way one sees, hears, thinks,
…and yet somehow, in the midst of it all, inexplicably, un-understandably, incomprehensibly life goes on. And it does:
…the extremely bizarre fact that being without my sweetheart is, at bottom, more okay more often than I imagined it would be. It turns out that being without him is not impossible, only monumentally hard.
Thanx, Shannon, for being candid and vulnerable in letting us in on your grief…it helps us understand our own facets of grief better. Grief is a long hard personal journey that can feel so isolating, so lonely…and at times, rather bizarre…unless we talk about it and share the full and broad range of “normal” to remind each other that it is *$#@% hard to have a loved one ripped out of one’s life.
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