Thoughts on the Grief Process

                           Thoughts on Grief

My 53 year old son laid down to take a nap on Dec 12, 2015 and never woke up.  This event has left a great hole in my heart.


Grief – the grieving process, and it is a process – a process that just keeps on going.  It takes many forms but it is never really over.  It is a lot like riding the waves – sometimes you are up, and other times you are down, and there is no way of predicting when the next wave will grab you.


Just when you think you are really going to be over it – something comes along to ramp it up again.  A memory of an event, or a birthday, or the anniversary of their passing, or a picture that you come across, or a favorite song that you hear on the radio.  It could be anything.  And your feelings spiral up down and around, leaving you with your sadness once again.


As I write this, Joe has been gone 3 ½ years.  He had what most people hope and pray for – a peaceful kind of death – a quiet kind of death – a lay down for a nap and never wake up kind of death!  No violence, no murder, no lingering illness – just a peaceful unannounced transition.


While it is a peaceful death for the one who dies – it leaves those of us who knew and loved him stunned and sad!  The simple suddenness of it is so hard to wrap our brains around!


I can remember getting that phone call and hearing the news “Joe’s dead”!  And I couldn’t grasp it.  “What did you say?” Hoping for a really bad phone connection that was responsible for those crazy words I didn’t want to hear! “What did you say?”   “Joe’s dead”


But life does go on for the rest of us.


Even though I am now in something called a “new normal” – it is a new place that doesn’t include my child.  Only memories of his life with me.


This new normal is the detour on the trajectory of my life – a detour that shouldn’t have happened, a detour that I never planned for – and there is no way I can ever go back to the original route that my life had been on!


I can remember the old TV show – The Twilight Zone.  This new normal is a lot like waking up in an episode of The Twilight Zone – waking up and finding everything is subtly different.  Things seem to be as usual, but something seems out of whack – and then I remember what the missing part is.  I can see where I should be in my life, but I can never get there again.  The old joke “you can’t get there from here!” takes on a new and sad dimension.


Another observation - 58 years ago I lost one child to a miscarriage – it was really early on - only 7 weeks.  While the grief is not as intense, there is still a sense of loss that I have had to process, and this new normal applies here as well.  This grief is hidden and very private, but I often wonder what life would have been like if I had carried that child to term.

There are plenty of “what if” kind of thoughts.  I still sometimes “talk” to that child, asking why she or he couldn’t stay with me.


Grief takes on many forms in our lives.  It could be caused by the loss of a child, or a parent or a spouse, or a dear friend.  It becomes part of the fabric of our lives.  Sometimes it hurts really bad, and other times it hurts a bit less.

All I can do is take a deep breath and ride those waves – knowing that in spite of the pain of my grief – life does go on.  

And I can give thanks for the gift of my loved one’s life, the life that was entrusted to me for the time he was with me.