It's been a turbulent time for some of my friends lately dealing with illness and grief. It has me thinking of all the things we potentially lose throughout our lives and what we do with our grief.
The obvious place for me to start this discussion is with the loss of a parent, but it could just as well be a grandparent, a sibling or a child. I was 20 when my father died, cancer took him from us when he was just 53 years young. For me that grief hasn't gone away even though nearly 30 years have passed. My grief has changed and I've learned to live with it but it's still there. There are times when I glance at a stranger on the street and something about them reminds me of Dad. Times when I'm talking to my son and wishing like crazy that Dad was here to share his wisdom and humour. And every day I miss having him around. I still feel short changed because he's not here with us.
Looking back there are so many other things I've also lost over the years and for which I still grieve.
There was my first serious crush, I thought I'd never get over him. My high school friends will laugh thinking back on those times but my grief was real and overwhelming at the time. I don't think you ever really get over your first teenage crush and even now I still think of him from time to time but they are happy thoughts.
My first love was a rollercoaster ride without a doubt ... a ride that spanned a period of maybe 5 years. It was an on again off again relationship, more off than on, but each time the grief was harder to manage. To deal with that grief I would throw myself into anything new to the point of obsession. But I survived it and over the years I dealt with the grief and learned some important things about myself. One of those lessons was that it's not always about me! Yep, the on again, off again nature of that relationship had everything to do with his maturity and nothing to do with my worth. I wish I'd learned that one years earlier!
During my teens I lost my innocence when I experienced both sexual assault and then much later domestic violence in my first live-in relationship. That grief took more than 20 years to deal with. It changed me and set me up for any number of negative experiences as an adult. I lost the ability to trust for many years as a result and I set a particularly low value on myself. I was well into my 40s when I finally understood and believed that I was worthy of love and deserved better. Once I achieved that understanding I was able to release the grief around those situations.
My first marriage ended in divorce after just a year. In some ways that grief was easier to cope with because I felt so much anger at the time. I honestly believe that it's not possible to feel more than one truly extreme emotion at a time. So what I did to deal with that grief was EVERYTHING. I threw myself into so many "bad" or unwise situations that the grief was buried. I'm not sure I fully dealt with that grief until well into my second (current) marriage.
At the end of 2011 came my cancer diagnosis and a lengthy period of intensive treatment. I've spoken about this time before and probably will again in the future but here, just now, I only want to discuss the grief associated with my whole cancer journey. It might surprise you to know that the biggest source of grief was not the physical scars, or the loss of my hair. It wasn't grief for loss of physical ability or feeling well. It wasn't even the grief over friends who disappeared from my life because they couldn't deal with either my illness or how I tried to cope with it. The greatest grief I experienced during, and after, my cancer treatment was/is the loss of feeling invulnerable. Until my diagnosis I had never considered my mortality, even having been beside my dad as he fought, and lost, his own battle. But suddenly I had a life threatening illness and no guarantees that I would survive it. Even after all I went through in my teens and early 20s I still had a degree of innocence until the Big C struck. The most difficult part of surviving cancer for me has been dealing with my own mortality. And though I have learned to keep it in check for the most part I still grieve for the time when I could look years ahead into my future and make plans with no question marks.
If I'm being totally honest with myself, and with you, I still grieve the loss of innocence through each stage of my life but that grief has now morphed into a determination to make every day count. I make a conscious effort to celebrate every achievement, and every birthday, to hold my friends and family as close as I can and show them how much they mean to me and to NOT put things off for another day. To not wait for better weather, not wait until we can better afford something, not wait until some other criteria is met. I've turned that grief into purpose and motivation and gratitude.
Whatever grief you are experiencing, please don't let it take away your purpose, your joy or your future. Use it to fuel your passion and motivate you to do things, learn from it and grow!
Connie Johnson said it perfectly: "Now is awesome".
