Swam. Did some work. Got Melissa's Memorial Invite done.
Created: 2023-04-05
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Dear John
- Adulting: Swam, mail, paperwork, moved a few more things around inside the house. Talked with a few different people -- still informing people on what happened or how I'm doing.
- Melissa's Memorial Invite Yesterday, I did a lot of work (and finished up) the Memorial invite. Such an easy task. So hard. I had help (thanks Gina). But nostalgia and looking on any fond memories just reminds me of the soul crushing loss. I'm happy in the present. Happy for our past. But if I dwell on what a great life we had, I can still collapse back to sorrow about the lost future.
- Grief Groups I still follow a few grief groups (and seem to be able to help a few people via my communication skills), finished a book on Grief (The Widower's Notebook), and started another (It's OK that you're not OK). I still feel the same pain as everyone else, just seem better able to take it (for now).
- The first book (The Widower's Notebook) felt like an art professor wrote a book about his wife's death, and how he responded. Which he was and did. But I don't have a kid to do roadtrips with, Melissa's death wasn't a mystery that required lawyers, I didn't become a basket case (yet), and didn't try to assuage my feelings of loneliness with a student 1/2 my age and her bisexual boyfriend, and I don't do New York pretentious dinner parties trying to out intellectual everyone else. So it was a bit long-winded and only superficially relevant to me. Someone died. That sucks. Feel bad for him.
- The next book (It's OK that you're not OK) is more an accademics approach to how to better handle grief. Teaching people how to cope with grieving people as a back-handed way of teaching greiving people why people that don't know how to handle them sets them off? Why statements like, "it'll get better", or "at least you had X years", "they're in a better place" or "I suffered the loss of parent/child/pet" irritates some grievers. It converts the story from their suffering to the other, minimizes their pain, or they hear, "so get over it" at the end. So far, I get it, but not stickig with me, as I don't hear in the imagined sentence -- and I don't imagine in that they're trying to minimize my pain, convert it to being about them, or all the things that some people that want to be angry will do. But I have seen it in other grievers, so it's still good to review triggers and why.
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Tags: Grief
