I am coming across some thoughts and visions about this experience with losing Jordon and the onset of my grief…my love…ongoing for him. The pain still hurts a lot.

In the beginning I was just trying to survive.  I had my eye on the prize which was surviving the first year without the father of my eleven year old son.  I got there.  I felt a “finish line completion” emotion come over me, but then I went home from the race I was so glad that I had won that I didn’t take notice to the aloneness of our home. It was still the same. The silence was deafening.  Jackson, as an eleven year old boy, who had had only 6 weeks to digest this was going to happen to us was sitting with me looking up into our big Victorian style house that I had just finished fully renovating, and said, ” This house feels too big now”.  I know he was experiencing the feeling of the Great Void.  I felt it too in those first few months of the epicenter of Grief.  Wow.  It is a feeling that cannot be fully described in words and to which no person on this planet that if you have never had this experience happen to you, then there is no way for you to understand it.  It has to be experienced to fully understand what grief feels like.  My point is, grief is a life-altering, completely enveloping, full emotion that comes to stay in our lives forever.  We have to make room for it.  It effects every other emotion we have.  Every relationship we have.  Everything.  It is a new era of our lives when we have this ushered in to our lives whether we want it or not.  Whether we believe it or not.

Grief is love.  Therein lies the duality, yet the dichotomy of Grief.  This powerful emotion of grief can also create a cataclysmic broadening of our awareness, our spirit, our Higher Power, and our knowledge and wisdom to our lives here on earth now.  The here and now is happening.  We are still living and breathing and responding and trying and scratching and clawing our way through this experience.  Many of us have very spiritual experiences of our Loved Ones passing away.  I always try to remember to Look Up.  Use Tenet 1 and Tenet 2 as your Highest Level go-tos for strength and wisdom and perseverance through the real hard days.  Acknowledge the surreal love with the pain, signs from above if you see or feel them, and enjoy the connectedness you can have to what you need to survive, heal, and thrive?   The ultimate choice would always be to be able to have this wisdom intact that we all experience through grief and just go back and have our loved one back with us.  Gratitude would abound. But we all know the truth and our lives are moving forward without them…..Like Alcoholics Anonymous is for the Alcoholic, a Spiritual Solution, so we are for Grief.  Higher Power, Finding a Sanctuary, Learning to Forgive.  It is working for me and for many others too.  I need it daily.

The Key to opening your heart to Grief that will never leave your doorstep, is to accept Grief in and give Wisdom and Knowledge a comfortable chair to sit on.  The pain and the heartache and the grief waves will be there too, but they don’t get to steal your joy, gratitude, and hope, and love. Every emotion has a place at the table of your heart with Grief. Grief is just the visitor that has come to stay. We just have to make room for it and allow the good emotions to have their say too.