Everywhere Grief

Posted 5/30/12

How I wish it wasn’t so.  Today, while at lunch with my dad, I let my heart be pierced by the gravity and pain and incomprehensibility of a neighbor’s cancer.  At 44, she is a year younger than I am.  Her father succumbed to stomach cancer at the very same age.

My mother has been keeping me updated.  I’ve heard the words and known it wasn’t good.  Yet, to be completely and humbly honest, I hadn’t let the reality “in” to my heart.  I kept it cerebral.  Somehow that felt safer.

And yet today, while dining with my father, my heart opened up to their reality and I began to cry.  Imagining what it must be like to be a mother – a mother desperately in love with her daughter, helplessly watching that body give way, putting her in hospice, the child she was never to lose.

I cannot begin to truly know the pain of this mother, or this daughter.  Just stepping ever so slightly towards it with an open heart, has brought me to tears throughout the day.

I am a Certified Grief Recovery Specialist®.  I confess that, on some level, I had hoped that knowing “how” and “what” to do with grief would somehow inoculate me from it.  That I had figured out some clever, back door way to lead a life free of grief.

But it doesn’t work like that. Grief is everywhere.  And none of us are immune.  How I wish that wasn’t so.