Most of us have certain feelings we’d much rather live without. Like walking through a buffet line, we say, “I’ll take two spoonfuls of those Joy feelings, three helpings of Happiness and a dab of Excitement. Hold the Discouragement please and I REALLY don’t like Sadness. I don’t want any of that.”
If it only worked that way. On December 1, 2010 I received a phone call at 1:15 in the morning that would cause me to downward spiral into a vat of dark, slimy, foul feelings which I loathed. “Ma, Jon hung himself in my basement. He’s dead, Mom.” “I’m sorry. I was woken up from a deep sleep. Excuse me?” As my husband and I rushed down the street to the “crime scene”, I peered into the ambulance as the EMTs pumped on the chest of my 21-year-old ‘baby’. Thirteen hours later he just ‘flew away’. My sadness was a hollowness. I can't tell you what's worse; sometimes my hollowness was a shell, holding in a thousand oceans of tears. Sometimes though, it held a million pieces of glass that were wedged in between my soul and body. That's the pain. Entirely consumed by wretchedness; every other emotion pushed from my being. Where there was the love, the light, the laughter was an aching hollowness. In this sadness there is no past or future, just a living by the moment, breath by breath. Every day was measured from the moment of waking into this new reality until my body could do no more, until sleep would come to rest my weary mind. I felt like I had the flu for a full year. Each day I greeted the sun like a climber greets their rope, fingers holding on fast despite the pain. GRIEF came in cold wintry waves. What emptiness was -or feeling empty- was just a lack of something missing. It could even be a defense mechanism because you really do not want to feel the pain or the emotions from a loss. So, you replace it with a void. If you can’t feel it, you can’t heal it. Going to therapists wanting them to wave their ‘magic wand’ and miraculously take the pain away. Or better yet, a front-end loader to load up the tons of grief and toss it into the dark never-ending abyss. PAIN. Oh it hurts. It changes you. Along with the usual symptoms and stages of grief, there are many issues that make parental bereavement particularly difficult to resolve. And this grief over the loss of a child can be exacerbated and complicated by feelings of injustice — the understandable feeling that this loss never should have happened. And then there’s the wouldas, couldas, shouldas. They taunt you at every turn. If you can’t feel it, you can’t heal it. Surviving the death and loss of a child takes a dedication to LIFE. As a parent, you give birth to life as a promise to the future. Now you must make a new commitment to LIVING, as hard or impossible as it may seem. You WILL get through this and survive; however, you NEVER get over it. If you can’t feel it, you can’t heal it. The day came when I realized that I didn’t fall asleep sobbing; I could drive home from work without the constant inconsolable gut-wrenching, soul-splitting and life-crushing wailing; that I could talk about Jon without my voice cracking. That I could say the word, SUICIDE. If you can’t feel it, you can’t heal it. What I’ve discovered is we can learn to reject feelings, but in doing so we reject ALL feelings. When we turn up our nose at Discouragement and Sadness, we actually decrease our capability for feeling the positive emotions of Joy and Gratitude. Whatever sad feelings you are going through today, allow yourself to FEEL them. And in that experience, you will be healed. TRUST ME. Remembering Jonathon Mike Gundrum 7.5.89~12.1.10
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AuthorI am a wife, mother, and grandmother. Late in life I decided to go back to school to become a professional counselor. I have achieved that dream, and am open for business. Archives
August 2019
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