If you’ve been following me you’ll know I lost my father six weeks ago. Today marks his 83rd birthday. Mine is tomorrow. He was 32 when I was born and we had a family joke that he gave up his birthdays for me, so he was only 32. We laughed that for the last 18 years, I was the patriarch – not him.
But for about 4 years now, I’ve had to be the patriarch. I lost my mother 3 years ago, but it was a slow process and my father needed to focus on her health. I needed to remind him of appointments and responsibilities as he declined without her.
But that isn’t what I want to talk about today.
The Grief Process
When we lose someone in our life things stop making sense in a lot of ways. There is confusion, you lose your train of thought a lot and have to deal with stress, anxiety, anger. The closer the person, the less makes sense.
For example, I weep for those killed over this past weekend due to the conflict with Iran. These are people who had their lives stolen from them. Some of them are children who haven’t even had much life. However, this motivates me to protest war. It doesn’t bring me to my knees for hour crying.
When I lost my 97 year old grandfather, I cried. I cried a lot. A couple weeks later I cried less. In a few months, even less. More than 10 years on, I don’t cry. I smile because I think of how much I love him, the good memories, the lessons he taught me.
When both my mother and father passed, I wasn’t really allowed time to grieve right away. As the eldest child, local child, I had to handle a lot of post-death administration. For my father, I have to do all of it. This required me to box up feelings before I could do those things. But they never stay in the box.
The Grief Ball
I didn’t come up with this. I learned it long ago from a therapist I had. And it wasn’t grief for a person, but an ability I lost.
However, I’ve since modified it with my own words, analogies and adopted it for a broader audience. Grief is a button in a box. Every time the button is pushed you feel the full power of grief. This never changes. Eighty years from now, when that button gets hit, it will hurt the same as it did day one.
Inside the box is a ball. I call it the grief ball (naming things is hard). It is what triggers your grief. When you first experience a loss, the ball is inflated to the maximum care size for the loss. Iranian school girls feels like its a ping pong ball to me, but for the parents of each child it is a gym ball. Every time the ball hits the button I get angry and grieve for them and their families. But this is a pretty big box and the ball hits the button maybe once a day.
The ball in my mother’s grief box is the size of a softball. Its hit the button many times during the day. On the day she passed, the ball was pushing out of the box.Over time it deflated and hit the button less.
When my father passed, I boxed it all up to get through the paperwork of it all. The ball was big and hitting frequently, but I didn’t have time to deal with it. Following the Buddhist philosophy, I would acknowledge the thought and let it go. But on this auspicious day, there is no letting go. It will be present all day, and March 4th and 5th will never be the same.
Grief is Hard, But You Can Get Through It
Don’t run away from it. You need to work through these feelings. But you also don’t need to grasp onto the thoughts. That’s when we get ourselves into trouble. Trying to hold onto something only brings more grief, anger, frustration, and suffering. When it hits, sit with it. Acknowledge it. Feel it. Then let it go. This will help you get through moment.
This takes practice. If I didn’t study philosophy, religion (especially eastern religion), and years of meditation practice, I wouldn’t have been able to get through the last 6 weeks as well as I have. If you have a local meditation center, I strongly recommend going and learn to really meditate. You don’t need to be a Buddhist, but Buddhism has some lessons that work well in any circumstance.
This is my journey. I thought I’d share in case someone else can gain something from it.
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