Grief
Today I am grateful for stability in many forms in my life, and for a willingness to work on the areas where more stability is needed.
I am picking up again that seeming contradiction I wrote about yesterday. Clouds and sun. Joy and pain. If we never knew the joy of love and happiness, we wouldn’t feel the grief and heartaches of loss. And we wouldn’t make it back out of the heaviness of grief.
I went to a memorial service for Janine yesterday afternoon. She was someone I knew from breast cancer support group and the Voices of Hope DVDs project. It would have been her 66th birthday yesterday, but she didn’t make it. The ravages of metastatic breast cancer ended her life, like they ended my sister Mary Jo’s life less than two months ago.
I attended the service with four other women from our support group. Between us, we have over 70 years of survivorship. And still, we just get today. That’s all.
I have watched the Voices of Hope videos again in recent days, after not watching them for some time. Seeing and hearing Janine’s quiet wisdom was a good reminder of life's precious nature. I also saw and heard myself and other women I was with yesterday, closer to the intense times of our cancer surgeries and treatment.
We did good work and continue to provide a good service to new patients and their families through these videos. I was reminded of the wide range and depth of the emotions I experienced at that time, along with my family.
Just like, when I went to Janine’s service and from there to the wake of the elderly father of two of my coworkers, I was reminded of the intensity and depth of grief I felt at the time of Mary Jo’s death and in those first couple weeks after.
It was an opportunity for some good grieving yesterday. Grief shifts and changes, comes and goes. I am not rushing it, running from it, burying it. I am welcoming it when it comes, because it is the only healthy way through it.
Joy and grief coexist. Life and death coexist. In the fortunate moments, I grasp the depth of meaning in it all, and I step forward with faith.
I am picking up again that seeming contradiction I wrote about yesterday. Clouds and sun. Joy and pain. If we never knew the joy of love and happiness, we wouldn’t feel the grief and heartaches of loss. And we wouldn’t make it back out of the heaviness of grief.
I went to a memorial service for Janine yesterday afternoon. She was someone I knew from breast cancer support group and the Voices of Hope DVDs project. It would have been her 66th birthday yesterday, but she didn’t make it. The ravages of metastatic breast cancer ended her life, like they ended my sister Mary Jo’s life less than two months ago.
I attended the service with four other women from our support group. Between us, we have over 70 years of survivorship. And still, we just get today. That’s all.
I have watched the Voices of Hope videos again in recent days, after not watching them for some time. Seeing and hearing Janine’s quiet wisdom was a good reminder of life's precious nature. I also saw and heard myself and other women I was with yesterday, closer to the intense times of our cancer surgeries and treatment.
We did good work and continue to provide a good service to new patients and their families through these videos. I was reminded of the wide range and depth of the emotions I experienced at that time, along with my family.
Just like, when I went to Janine’s service and from there to the wake of the elderly father of two of my coworkers, I was reminded of the intensity and depth of grief I felt at the time of Mary Jo’s death and in those first couple weeks after.
It was an opportunity for some good grieving yesterday. Grief shifts and changes, comes and goes. I am not rushing it, running from it, burying it. I am welcoming it when it comes, because it is the only healthy way through it.
Joy and grief coexist. Life and death coexist. In the fortunate moments, I grasp the depth of meaning in it all, and I step forward with faith.
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