As the days and the years run forward, reality rolls on and you experience more and more the absence of your beloved. You cannot deny the absence as years go by. You cannot deny the ending of what was once a beloved life. You must surrender to the ending. You must surrender to the absence of your loved one.
So many try to pull the life forward, as if pretending the loved one still exists on earth will keep the loved one alive. I don’t believe that sentimentality helps. I saved many, many of my mother’s things after my mother died, only to relinquish bit by bit, painfully spreading out the separation. My grief kept me from living in the present. I lost myself in the grief. I just did not want to let go of her. I mistakenly believed that her things would transmit a piece of her heart to me. It took a long time to separate her things from her. It took a long time to know that she really was gone.
I do not wish to have done anything differently, the death of a loved one is ‘life interrupted’. There is nothing you can do to change the reality of your grief.
I just know today, that nothing could be different. Not any amount of bargaining, denying or trying, could make my mother’s death different, nor could it have made my grief different. My resistance did not change anything. Hanging onto my mother’s things did not sooth my loss. My loss was my loss.
Today is the eleventh anniversary of my children’s father dying suddenly of his one and only heart attack. I hope that my children are not bargaining, denying and resisting the truth of today. I hope that they can embrace the grief of the day and then walk away from the day.
