Grief & New Traditions

So if you've been following along with my blog or social media you've probably seen that I've been having a hard time lately.  January and also sometimes into February tend to be a hard time for me in general, so although this wasn't completely unexpected, it still sucks. Between becoming a year older, starting a new year, birthday anniversaries of loved ones I've lost along with their death anniversaries, it's been tough for me to not feel sad all the time. I've just felt reminded of how much my life has changed and in some cases how it is not at all where I expected I would be or even where I want to be. Then you add on to that all the grief that comes with remembering loved ones who are no longer with me and the struggle becomes even worse.

Grief is such a difficult concept for me because there is not a right and wrong way to grieve. As a business major, perfectionist, and gold personality, I strive in environments that have guidelines and right ways to do things. So you can just imagine how difficult it is for me to deal with emotions that are constantly changing and evolving, especially grief. When we think of grieving we automatically associate it with negative feelings and for obvious reasons. It's what we do when things go wrong, whether it's the death of someone we love or even just not getting that job we really wanted. I think that because it has such a negative connotation so many of us are afraid of feeling it, I know I am at least. Why would I want to sit down and grieve knowing that I'm signing up to sit down and be sad? I know, I know, that's not how it works but that’s what it feels like. This is why I've always pushed it away. It also doesn't help that I tend to compare myself to others. It's been a couple of years since I went through my cycle of tough losses, so why am I still grieving and struggling? I know people who have gone through much more recent losses and they seem fine. Well, for starters, I really don't know if they're fine I'm just making assumptions based on surface level interactions, which is the first thing I'm doing wrong. Secondly, grief is a process and since I pushed away my emotions so much at the beginning it's going to take me a while to heal. I have to first acknowledge these emotions and then work on coping with them. I need to let them happen before I can even begin to process them, because I previously just acted and tried to convince myself that everything was okay.

So how do you even begin to process grief, right? Well I don't have all the answers because I'm still learning myself, but I would love to start the conversation. Grief is something I've currently been working on with my therapist and I'm realizing it's so much more than being sad that someone is no longer here or things didn't go exactly as planned, or in my case both. Grieving is remembering the good times and the bad, the positive and the negative. For example, this Monday would have been my grandpa's birthday and I was really struggling. I wanted to remember him but I also didn't want to invite in those sad feelings of loss when I was already in such a fragile state. My therapist helped me with this in two different ways. The first was figuring out why this is a loss I'm struggling with so much. Besides the fact that he was my grandpa and my last living grandparent, there was so much more. If we're lucky, and I consider myself to have been among the luckiest if I do say so myself, our grandparents are almost like these magical beings in our life. They are like fairy godparents, for instance. Our relationship with them is for the most part all good. They step in when you're annoyed with your parents or your parents are annoyed with you. They give the best hugs and they always know the right thing to say. They are the ultimate authority, because I mean they're your parents' parents so they have to be right. You create this bond full of so much love and goodness with them and it's a bond that you will never be able to create with someone else. Your parents can't fill that bond because as much as we love them (hey mom and dad) they see us for the good and the not so good. We fight, we argue, we annoy, and of course we love, but it's entirely different than that sacred relationship we have with our grandparents. For me, I was not only grieving the loss of my grandpa and not getting to celebrate his birthday with him anymore, but I was still struggling to fully process the loss of never getting to experience that grandparent relationship on earth again. Wow, no wonder I pushed my grieving away because that's a lot to process! In recognizing this, though, it's helped me realize that this is not something one just gets over and grieving really is a process that truly takes time.

The second thing my therapist helped me realize is that grieving and remembering doesn't have to be sad. What? I know, right, it's kind of mind-blowing. We tend to focus so much on the fact that they're gone that we forget all the good years we had with them (or at least I do). I mean people always say remember the good times, be thankful for the time you had with them, and at the moment you're internally thinking "please shut up because they're gone and I'm sad", but those people are so right. This is how we start to really process grief, I think. We need to move from the fact that they're no longer here because we can't control that, but we can control remembering them in the positive light that we want to. I know it's easier said than done and it's not going to happen overnight but this is what I'm really going to try to do moving forward. My mom and I started a new tradition this Monday to help us try and grieve and remember in a positive way. We decided that when it is the birthday of someone we have lost, that instead of walking on eggshells and trying to figure out if we bring it up and talk about them and let ourselves feel sad or if we just act like it's another day, we are going to make a meal that reminds us of them. This way, we aren't just letting the day pass but we are also choosing to remember the happy moments from either eating that meal with them or knowing how much they loved it, to help us remember them with a smile instead of with painful tears. (Although happy tears are always a good thing.) Making a meal seems like such a simple thing but I can tell you that it helped me so much on Monday to make that meal in honor of my grandpa and for the first time in a while I remembered him without only feeling sad that he is gone.

Wow, this was a long one so thanks for sticking with me! I would love to hear what you have learned when it comes to trying to handle grief. Do you do any traditions to remember your loved ones? This is all so new to me to actually process these emotions in a healthy way instead of crying myself to sleep when no one is around, so I would to hear any and all thoughts on the subject!

Until next time. 💜