When my son died, a bomb went off in my life. My life stopped and everything became so insanely difficult. Cooking, showering, organizing, remembering things, going out into the world, just about everything felt impossible. I kept waiting for things to get better and for these basic abilities to return. But that wasn’t happening very fast. I felt like I needed to hurry up and get to a place where I was strong enough to manage my life normally. I…
Grief has a way of making regular every day things incredibly difficult. For me, learning what to put my energy and thoughts toward was extremely helpful in managing every part of my journey. It’s like we wake up every day with 100 beans. As we go through our day, we spend our beans doing the different tasks that regular life requires. Making dinner takes a few beans, cleaning your kitchen, feeding the dog, or even just talking on the phone….
One of the first things I noticed after my son died was how different everything was. I felt differently about so many things. Things that used to make me anxious suddenly did not bother me at all, and things that I used to do without thinking became incredibly difficult. And the new hard things? Well, they were a whole new level of overwhelmingly impossible. It was like my soul went from living on the land to being thrown out to…
Visiting my sister’s house is always such a fun and activity-filled vacation. We always do so many fun things. We sew, we craft, we laugh, we eat yummy food and rarely sleep beyond a slight nap between days, we cram our time with so many fun things! But this was the first time we have ever went through her keepsake box. What a treasure this time was. It was interesting to see the things that belonged to my mother. Casual…
The intense upheaval of everything in life after losing someone you love is complicated, difficult and so painful that you end up feeling anything but calm. But finding a way to calm down and create a space that remains calm on the inside creates a place to heal, rest and get stronger. This felt impossible for me, but I found that by doing a handful of small things often, that place started to build itself each time I needed it….
In the beginning of this journey, all I could focus on was sleeping, eating and doing my best to seek a calm and quiet space to rest and heal. As time went by, I started to see that when I did small positive things during the day, my life began to get better, and I started to feel stronger and more in charge of what I wanted my new life to include. As I continued to get stronger, I became…
While the idea of seeking and remaining calm was my first task and helped me tremendously to get a bit of a handle on the constant chaos that I seemed to find myself in, I found that I also needed to lift myself up at times. As time went by I started to see patterns emerge as things happened in my life. If something even remotely stressful was happening, life got really hard and seemed to snowball. Laundry was overwhelming…