I talk with many, many people about dealing with grief, for countless different and unique reasons, but the commonality is loss followed by grieving.

I feel like something of an expert on grieving, I’ve done everything both to experience and feel it as deeply as possible and to let go without losing everything. It’s not a balancing act, it’s a wandering path in the forest. What helps one day may not help the next, but perhaps long term you do find a measure of relief.

Worse yet, I’ve shared grief with the mother and family I now refer to as my “pseudo-in-laws” (because I wasn’t married to him when Artie died). And let me tell you . . . as awful as my loss experience was and that I even fell through the bottom of depression as a result, I still think that what I’ve been through is NOTHING compared to what his mom went through and still suffers every day. I cannot imagine a more severe grief than that for the loss of a child.

Time Does NOT Heal All Wounds

I hate the saying “time heals all wounds.” Time doesn’t heal crap. Time s just time, and a minute to you may not even be the same length of time as a minute for the next guy. I know that I don’t experience time in the same way for even an entire day anymore. When I get up in the morning, I pet Seoul a little because she needs lots of love when she wakes up, and I let Mizzou sleep in. He’s getting old, he doesn’t usually get up until 9AM, at which point I’ve been up more than four hours. Mizzou may be getting old, but he does NOT have a rough life.

The thing is, the first three hours of my day are both the longest and the shortest. I’ve changed my schedule completely (in terms of my personal time and when I sleep, mostly) so that the first three hours of my day are “me” time. For some people that may mean going for a run or to the gym, or yoga. For me the first thing now is a morning meditation (after giving Seoul her necessary dose of love), my daily runecasting, and journaling. I give myself time to ponder what’s going on in my life and sense whether or not I’m moving in the right direction. At some point after about three hours, I brush my teeth and come back to my computer to log in for my day job.

The next eight to ten hours go by fast but seem to take forever. I have great “tunnel vision” for work. I’m sitting at my laptop engrossed in solving a problem, and I don’t hear anything around me. There was only one time in recent memory where my tunnel vision didn’t work, I was at a Starbucks and this woman was totally dictating to this guy how he was going to treat her and what he was going to do for her and she was so freaking loud even I couldn’t ignore her. So I left, went to another Starbucks (my RV was in the shop so I didn’t have my satellite internet), logged in again and got back to work. So the time passes very quickly, but it’s lost time. I do my day job because it provides the income for me to go road-tripping around the country doing whatever I want during the 14 non-day-job hours in a 24-hour period.

The evening usually goes quickly and is very enjoyable except that sometimes the neuropathy burning has gotten so bad by then that I’m having a hard time concentrating. Anyway, the point is, time is not time, it’s variable.

The Grief Recovery Handbook

In the first couple of months after Artie’s death, I listened to a book on tape that one of my friends gave me. It’s basically a self-help guide for people grieving for a lost loved one or divorce, which can also be a deep loss even if it is the right thing to do. Anyway, The Grief Recovery Handbook . . . I just looked it up, the current version is actually The Grief Recovery Handbook, 20th Anniversary Expanded Edition: The Action Program for Moving Beyond Death, Divorce, and Other Losses including Health, Career, and Faith by John James and Russell Friedman. Twelve bucks on Amazon. For that price, if you’re grieving for the lizard your cat just killed, you could use this book to recover from the grief.  🙂

There were a lot of exercises in the book, and I did them all. Now, eight years later, I only really remember two. One was a chronological timeline of your relationship. You draw a horizontal line on a piece of blank paper, put the start and end dates (sorry, that sounds callous, but it is what it is), and then fill in the timeline with major events in your relationship. The only reason I remember the chronology exercise though, is because you use the output of that as a tool to draft your letter of resolution (or something like that). I don’t remember exactly what the letter is called, but the idea is you write a letter to the person you have lost, and then go read it aloud. Not to them (especially if it’s a divorce thing), but aloud in the presence of a trustworthy friend. You write about the things that are bottled up inside you and then seek or give forgiveness for each event.

Mine is four and a half pages long in 10-point Monotype Corsiva. I still have it with me all the time, folded up in a back pocket of my purse or backpack. At first I needed to have it within reach all the time because the contents made me feel close to Artie, then I just liked having it so I could read it aloud at his gravesite each year on the day of his death (October 19^th), and now I keep it because I still like knowing it’s there, even though I never read it. I pulled it out just now to see how long it was, and it’s all weather-worn with crumpled corners and creases so worn they’re splitting the paper, but it’s still intact.

In the exercise, you write the letter, then you go somewhere that was special to you with the lost loved one, or just somewhere peaceful that you like to be, and you read your letter aloud. A close friend comes with you, and they hear your letter, but they don’t say anything and you don’t talk about any of it. They are just there to be real ears, because then you really feel like your words are being heard (yeah, yeah, because they are being heard, I know).

I spent a week working on my letter, and was a bit elaborate about the “ceremony.” I went up to the top of Mt. Tam (Mount Tamalpais, a bit north of San Francsico on the 1) with my closest friend Brian in tow. Actually, I think he’s the one that gave me the book, but anyway, he knew to be quiet and just be there. Before getting out to hike over to a boulder Artie and I loved to sit on to watch the sunrise or just gaze out above the clouds, I played “Angel” by Sara McLaughlin in the car, because that’s what Artie’s brothers and I listened to on the way from their house to his funeral. When we got to the boulder and climbed up, I opened up my backpack and took out a big wool blanket (I knew it wouldn’t be particularly comfy, and my letter wasn’t short), then I spread a bag of bougainvillea petals all over, from my backyard. We sat down, I took a few deep breaths, looked out at the sky, and read.

It was an amazing release. I also felt like Artie was right there listening, nodding, remembering it all with me. I heard Brian sniffle a couple times and I had tears streaming down my face the whole time, but I read the whole thing out loud, then we went back to the car and listened to “The Prayer” by Josh Groban because Artie’s sister’s best friend sang it at his funeral and it is amazingly poignant. Then I drove back down the mountain, got a good hug from Brian, and went home.

Writing the letter and reliving the memories was both painful and beautiful. But reading is aloud on the mountaintop loosened the knot in my chest and I literally felt like a stranglehold on my heart had loosened enough that it could beat again. If you are suffering any kind of loss, I completely and whole-heartedly recommend going through the grief recovery handbook.

Oh yeah, I almost forgot. The reading on the mountaintop was on my birthday.