Tag: abandoned

Peace, Love, and Grief – Absence

“The problem with death is absence.”
~ Roger Rosenblatt

Well, that says it all. I’m done.

Just kidding… well kind of… It really does seem to encapsulate the whole grief experience in a few succinct words… but I still want to linger with those words just a little bit.

Death brings up so many emotions in all of us, and those emotions can change not only each day, but with each breath. There have been times when I didn’t know what to do with all those emotions, especially in the beginning. For me, though, no matter what other emotions were in my heart, always in the periphery (if not in the foreground) were the feelings of loneliness and abandonment.

I know it sounds silly. Shoot, even to my rational mind, I know it is silly. However, from the moment I stood there and watched EMS working on Bruce, yelling at him in my mind to just breathe, but instead watching the line on the monitor remain flat, I felt like he had abandoned me. Logically, I knew better… I still know better. Yet, there is this part of me that I can’t deny which feels abandoned – left all alone to figure out the rest of my days.

Thankfully, I know better. I know Bruce would not have left me alone if he had a choice. I know he loves me… still. I know that feeling something doesn’t make it true. So, why? Why do I feel this way so often when I think about Bruce and this journey of grief that I now find myself on?

Well, the answer to that seems to go back a long way. Although, I honestly don’t know exactly where it comes from. However, I do know that feeling abandoned has been as much a part of me as my own DNA. It seems like there have always been people in my life who choose to use shunning as a form of “punishment” when they are angry rather than having the hard conversation to find a way through – either finding forgiveness or coming to an understanding that we can each live with.

Just to give you an example, my first husband could go for weeks (or even months) without talking to me whenever he felt angered or wronged in some way. The days would drag on and on, and I would fall deeper and deeper into depression and self-loathing… I would be devastated. I would lose all self-esteem as I begged and groveled for forgiveness. I can remember feeling so completely alone… and completely abandoned. Until one day, out of the blue, he would announce that he was “through being mad” and had decided to “forgive” me. No conversation… no understanding… nothing that spoke of love or caring.

At the time, I didn’t realize how emotionally abusive that was. However, after I left and began to heal, I figured it out pretty quickly. I came to understand that that was emotional abandonment, and no one deserves that… no one. I also swore I would never beg for someone to love me ever again.

With Bruce, I never did… I never had to because he truly loved me… All of me – the good, the bad, the silly, the irrational… all of me. I can honestly tell you that, because of Bruce, I know what unconditional love is and how wonderful it feels.

The night he died, though, all of those old, awful feelings from the past came rushing back… And to feel abandoned by this man who had loved me so deeply was beyond devasting.

However, life moves on… and I got help. Bruce is still gone; that won’t change. I still feel his absence each and every day. Sometimes, it is when I first wake up and realize all over again that I am the only one in the bed. Sometimes, it is when I come home to an empty house. There are also the times when I have exciting news to share or when my world feels like it is falling apart. No matter how much time passes, his absence can still take me by surprise, (as if that makes sense), and leave me with those same initial feelings of utter loneliness… and abandonment.

At the same time, I am getting quicker at recognizing what is happening and am able to remind myself that letting go “is one of the compromises we are forced to make in life”. * So, while my heart is broken right now, this is not the end… I still feel him beside me and see him in my dreams… I, also, know that he will be there waiting for me when it is my turn to say good-by here… Until then, I will miss him… and I will remind myself that absence is not always abandonment… Sometimes it is simply a temporary hole in my heart.

* Martha Whitmore Hickman, Healing After Loss
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Grief changes us. This journey is not an easy path for anyone. That is why I share the mistakes I have made, as well as what I have felt and learned along the way. Even sharing our stories of love and life can be helpful on this journey. We know learning to function on this new path is hard, and it is easy to lose our way or forget that we don’t have to do it alone. I don’t think any of us chose to be here… I know I didn’t. Yet, this is where life has landed us for now… This is where we are. Our lives are now filled with challenges we never imagined and emotions that feel overwhelming at times. So often, I think I have it all figured out, only to find that isn’t true at all. Despite the years since Bruce passed, my life is still filled with challenges, as I am sure yours is too. Learning to take it one day/moment at a time is all any of us can do.

Thankfully, I know I am not alone… None of us are… We have each other. It is our love for those we have lost that brings us together into this space where we can share our experiences. I believe the sharing of our stories is so important… I believe it is healing. Do you have a story to tell? I believe we can find courage and strength in one another’s stories. I believe we can offer each other empathy when we open our hearts to one another. I don’t know about you, but it makes me feel better knowing there are others out there who understand what I mean, and what I feel. It’s nice to know I’m not alone… Maybe this strikes a chord with you too. We would all love to hear your thoughts or your story. If you would like to share your experience or if you need a helping hand or maybe a virtual hug, let us know. We are here for you.

Please do… This is our community. To share your thoughts and experiences go to the comments and leave your message.*

This is a weekly blog, for daily affirmations we have a Facebook page of the same name. Join us daily at www.facebook.com/peaceloveandgrief

* Be advised that all comments are subject to approval prior to posting. Any comments determined to be spam or not in accordance with the mission of this website/blog will not be approved or posted. Furthermore, any comments determined to be hostile in nature will be reported to the proper authorities. Thank you.

Peace, Love and Grief… Surviving Versus Living

“Last night was rough. Woke up numb this morning. Praying God will hold to his promise and heal my pain. Where is God? I am abandoned. I have been angry, I know… I am trying. I remember once when was so mad at Bruce. He just reached out and hugged her. At first she resisted, but he wouldn’t stop hugging her. Instead he said, ‘You need this hug. You need to know I love you.’ … That is what I need from God…”
~ Linda, Feb 2013

Surviving versus living… That is where I found myself after Bruce passed away. I believe that conflict eventually becomes the choice of every grieving person. In the beginning, I remember the pain was so intense it took everything in me just to keep breathing. Getting out of bed and moving through my day was a moment by moment miracle. The basics of survival, like breathing and eating, which normally are done without much thought, not only required thought, they required will-power. It took everything in me just to survive.

I felt so very alone and isolated. None of my friends or family had been through this… I didn’t know who to turn to or how to ask for what I needed. Yet, I knew I was not the only person to have been on this path. I knew it because of the quotes and Bible verses that kept popping up around me, such as:

I am bowed down and brought very low;
All day long I go about mourning…
I am feeble and utterly crushed;
I groan in anguish of heart…
For I am about to fall,
And my pain is ever with me.
~ Psalm 38: 6,8,17

Maybe it sounds weird, but it brought me a bit of comfort to know others had gone before me on this path. Others knew how deep this pain could be… Maybe I was not so alone after all. Because of my faith, I also found promises of hope in verses such as:

My sorrow is beyond healing.
My heart is faint within me…
Is there no balm in Gilead?
Is there no physician there?…
‘For I will restore you to health and I will heal you of your wounds,’ declares the Lord.
~ Jeremiah 8:18,22 and 30:17

AND

Then you shall call and the Lord will answer,
you shall cry for help and he will say, “Here I am!”
~ Isaiah 58:9

And yet, I still seemed to feel utterly abandoned and alone… I still felt like I was merely surviving for a very long time. I did a lot during that time in an attempt to heal… I attended a support group, started journaling, continued running, did a lot of reading and expressed myself through painting and gardening. Yet, even through all of that, I just couldn’t quite get past merely surviving.

It is said that when the student is ready, the teacher will appear. Well, I must agree. I believe I did all of those things in preparation for my teacher…

It was ten months later when I started making the turn from mere survival toward truly living again. What was the trigger? Someone (a stranger) reached out and as my mother would say “entered my life to become ‘God with skin on.'”

It started simply as a guest speaker at our office. As a business and life coach, she started the session by asking us to decorate a banner with words stating our purpose, why we were there or how we felt about our life. I simply wrote, “survival.” As soon as she spotted it, she came behind me, drew a big heart around my one word and wrote “support.” With such a simple gesture, she had become “God with skin on” for me and given me that “hug” I had begged for months earlier.

Then, she offered me the unconditional support I needed by taking it a step further…

She quickly became my coach, and because I was ready, my teacher. It’s funny but we rarely talked about my grief. We talked about Bruce, my family, work… We talked about life. She reminded me that I was not alone. She reminded me that I needed to look for God in all things or I would never see God in anything. In less than 6 months, she taught me the difference in survival and living.
She re-introduced me to life… my life… and I am forever grateful.

At this point I want to be sure I am perfectly clear. Grief is real; it is individual; and it is not selfish. To avoid the time needed to work through your emotions and self reflection is not healthy… It is absolutely necessary. However, when the time is right (and it will be different for each person), the healing, (the movement from mere survival to living life), can begin.

So what makes the difference in living versus merely suviving? It is finding the divine energy within each of us. Then, using that source to become a divine reality for someone else by simply being the love and acceptance we are seeking from the world around us.

In other words, it is using the love within us to move from a place of “self” to a place of service.

Polish your heart
so that it reflects
God’s love
to the world around you
~ Linda, February 2016

What about you? How did you find your way on your grief journey? Did you ever feel like you were merely surviving? How did you come to terms with it? Or do you still need support in that area? Would you be willing to share your story or your thoughts?

Please do… This is our community. To share your thoughts and experiences go to the comments and leave your message.*

This is a weekly blog, for daily affirmations we have a Facebook page of the same name. Join us daily at www.facebook.com/peaceloveandgrief

* Be advised that all comments are subject to approval prior to posting. Any comments determined to be spam or not in accordance with the mission of this website/blog will not be approved or posted. Furthermore, any comments determined to be hostile in nature will be reported to the proper authorities. Thank you.

Peace, Love and Grief… Feeling abandoned

Abandoned: having been deserted or cast off… me…

From the beginning, grief has been a journey of many emotions… some conflicting, (which has left me feeling a bit crazy at times). But throughout these 2.5 years, “abandoned” has been my prevalent, on-going emotion. I have felt it since day one and still feel it to this day. Abandoned by Bruce… abandoned by God… abandoned by others… alone.

For those who are just starting on this journey and for those who have never been here, the emotions are strong; the emotions are real… but emotions have nothing to do with logic. To give you an idea, here is my journal entry two weeks after Bruce died:

January 27
Still here… still alone. I can’t help but feel that even God has abandoned me. I know – that makes me horrible, doesn’t it? But how could he give me 23 years with a man that hated me (and still does) but only 8 years with a man that loved me so completely? Someone told me that God allowed (or caused) the abuse with (my 1st husband) because of my sin. It hurt when it was said even though I didn’t believe it then. But now, I wonder…

God must not love me after all. But I don’t really understand… Out of everyone in the world, why can’t he love me?… Why can’t he forgive me, too?

Maybe I am wrong – maybe this is the grief talking. But I don’t understand… why Bruce? How can a God who loves me allow so much hurt? Why? Am I such a bad person?

This feels so wrong, so surreal. Life goes on around me, but I can’t seem to move. In order to move, I have to pretend that everything is fine and shove all the emotions down. I know people are uncomfortable with my grief, so I try really hard to hide it until I am alone. Then, I cry.

I go back to work tomorrow… that feels so scary. How do I do something so normal when my life has been thrown upside down? I feel like everyone who knows is watching me to see if I will fall apart. And for those who don’t know – I want to shout at them to stop… life needs to stop… because my life stopped when Bruce died. I want the whole world to stop for just one moment to honor him… to recognize that he is gone.

How do I ever feel happy – truly happy – again? I just want to crawl in a hole. It takes everything in me to get out of the bed. I can’t sleep… instead I lay there, imagining he is still there, too… still holding me…

There are a lot of thoughts and feelings that I don’t tell anyone. They won’t understand. They already spend so much energy trying to make me “not sad.” That doesn’t make me mad, but it doesn’t really work either. It just makes me want to be alone – to get inside my own head with my own thoughts. Then, I can imagine him still here. Oh my God, I need him so much!

I don’t think I can do this… it is too hard… too much is expected and all I want is to be with Bruce again – to love him and feel him next to me…
but that is something I can never have again… I am alone now.

That was 2.5 years ago… the feelings were so intense then. I can’t say they are gone now… they aren’t – they are still here… but the intensity is less. Some weeks are harder than others and some days are harder than others… this week has been both.

At work, things are changing quickly… many of my friends have moved on to new jobs. At home, my closest friends are planning to move within the year. On a rational level, I am so happy for all of them… Their lives are moving on as they should. However, on a personal level, I am faced with that overwhelming feeling of abandonment, once again.

This week I felt like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz when she says, “People come and go so quickly here.”

I hate these feelings. This week, I have found myself wanting to do what I always do – pull inside… hide or run away emotionally.

Instead, I am pushing myself to stay in the game. I am trying really hard to stay strong. The problem is – I don’t feel strong and there are very few people I trust enough to be honest about how I feel. I would give anything to have someone who loves me – who cares about me – to hold me… no words… Just take me in their arms, let me lay my head on their shoulder and cry.

But that isn’t going to happen… not today. So instead, I will smile and tell you I am fine…

They say it gets easier,
But it doesn’t.
The pain is still there,
Still strong, barely contained below the surface.
Waiting for that moment…
The moment when I am unprepared –
When I relax for a second.
And there it is, pouring out…
As tears slide down my cheeks;
And the pain is so great it is physically debilitating.
But I’m not allowed to show it.
No one wants to see it or hear it anymore.
I can only turn to myself for comfort.
There are no arms to hold me;
No gentle touch to wipe my tears.
No words of love or comfort.
Just my memories of us…
And the awful knowledge that
This is all too real.
~ Linda, Oct 12, 2014

Because this is OUR community, please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences, too. To do so, go to the comments and leave a note.*
Who knows… you may hold the answer for someone else.

This is a weekly blog, for daily affirmations we have a Facebook page of the same name. Join us daily at www.facebook.com/peaceloveandgrief

* Be advised that all comments are subject to approval prior to posting. Any comments determined to be spam or not in accordance with the mission of this website/blog will not be approved or posted. Furthermore, any comments determined to be hostile in nature will be reported to the proper authorities. Thank you.

Peace, Love and Grief… The value I couldn’t see

Recent research has shown that 2 out of 3 people have low self-esteem. WOW! That is quite a number! (And losing sight of your own value as a human being is quite a loss.) There are many things that feed into how we feel about ourselves but evidently many of us are buying into some pretty negative ideas. I grew up feeling loved and as a child, I remember feeling extremely confident. I have no idea at what point I lost that or why. I could play psychologist and wager a guess, but it would be exactly that – a guess.

I do know that by the time I met my first husband, my self esteem was already low… he didn’t create it. But because I didn’t value myself, I accepted that fact that he didn’t either. I spent many years accepting behaviors that should never have been tolerated… but I didn’t believe in my own value enough to set a boundary or have higher expectations.
After my first marriage ended, as I mentioned a few weeks ago, I had a lot of healing to do. I worked hard and I made progress, but always in the back of my mind was “His” voice saying, “The world would spin a lot easier if you weren’t on it.”

Bruce, however, saw me in a different light… His perspective became something I clung to when that other voice got too loud. I remember one day, soon after we were married. We were sitting on the barstools at the kitchen counter. I don’t remember what triggered the conversation, I only remember the miracle of his response.

I was feeling down on myself, and he was trying to understand why. (God bless him!) I took a piece of notebook paper, crumpled it into a ball and smoothed it back out. Then, I repeated that process several times. The paper looked like a crumpled mess… definitely a piece of trash.

“I feel like this is me,” I said. “Nothing but someone else’s piece of trash and you got stuck with someone else’s trash (me).”

Bruce sat quietly for a moment or two, never one to be rushed – always one to think things through before speaking. I don’t know what I expected to hear or if I even expected anything, but what he said next was a turning point for me.

Gently, he took a clean piece of paper from the stack and set it beside that crumpled paper. Then, as he touched the clean paper, he said, “I don’t think that at all.” Slowly, he tore off a corner of the clean paper and placed it in the center of the crumpled paper. “You may see all of this when you look at yourself,” he said as he gestured to the crumpled paper. “But when I look at you, all I see is this.” And he gently touched the clean piece he had laid in the center.

Why am I telling this story? Because after that, with Bruce’s unconditional love, I began to rebuild my own thought process about myself. It was a slow process and there were still some major gaps but I was moving forward… until that day in January of 2013 when my world fell apart.

When Bruce passed, I felt like I had been abandoned. I couldn’t understand why God would let this happen. Why did I have to spend so many years with someone who couldn’t love me and only a few short years with someone who loved me beyond all reason? Emotionally, I fell backwards about 10 years in regards to my self-worth and value. I couldn’t seem to believe in my own value anymore… If God didn’t see me as valuable, how could I? My self-esteem fell lower and lower. I couldn’t seem to pick myself up… not alone… not by myself.

Then, I met a wonderful woman who worked with me as a coach (and is still a dear, dear friend). By asking all the right questions (some that were initially infuriating), she helped me realize I had spent most of my life letting other people shape my thoughts about myself. When I was married to Bruce, it was positive shaping, but I was still giving that power to someone else. Until I learned to shape my own thoughts, I would always flounder with my own value… and that is a loss no one has to endure.

I started with an “Intentions” poster that still hangs in my bathroom. On it, I list short, encouraging phrases that build me up or encourage positive action. I, also, learned (and started implementing) the knowledge that just because someone says something, doesn’t make it true. I don’t have to take it in and make it a part of me. Shoot, I don’t even have to respond to it. Instead, I can realize that it is merely a reflection on them and their thought processes. I have the option to let it go… so I do.

There have been other epiphanies along this journey, and I have probably made the most progress in the last 8+ months as I become stronger in the knowledge that I have value. God never abandoned me or wanted me to hurt. He sent Bruce as a blessing… A starting point for my healing. God created me and loves me just as I am… He knows I am not perfect, but that is no surprise to him. He made me that way and loves me anyway. In fact, I am finally learning to love me just as I am, as well… Only this time it is not because someone else says I do or do not deserve it.

Losing Bruce was hard and losing myself in that process made it even harder. However, I know now that I am a whole person just as I am. Bruce always wanted me to know and believe that. Because of him, his love, his patience and his gentle nature, I am finally getting there.

I would have never thought that it would take grief for me to learn to see my own value. But life seems to teach us what we need to know wherever we are on our path.

Thank you, Babe, for always believing in me…

Because this is OUR community, please feel free to share your thoughts and experiences, too. To do so, go to the comments and leave a note.*

Who knows… you may hold the answer for someone else.

This is a weekly blog, for daily affirmations we have a Facebook page of the same name. Join us daily at www.facebook.com/peaceloveandgrief

* Be advised that all comments are subject to approval prior to posting. Any comments determined to be spam or not in accordance with the mission of this website/blog will not be approved or posted. Furthermore, any comments determined to be hostile in nature will be reported to the proper authorities. Thank you.