Good Grief

I wouldn't say that I'm a subject matter expert on this subject, but I have a lot of experience from my nursing days. As a student nurse in my senior year of college, I had one day a week for classes (Monday) and the rest of the week was devoted to my mentor on whatever floor I was working. The first semester I worked on something called a palliative care floor. Basically, a floor where people were transferred to keep them comfortable while they died. I had many wonderful experiences on this floor, but it always affected me deeply when I sat with someone while they died, especially if I was the only other person in the room. I had one patient in particular that I had become very fond of. She was a young mother (actually about my age now) that had 3 small daughters. She had cancer and had received radiation to her brain and as a result was now blind. She asked the nurses one day to allow me to stay with her in the room the whole day because she had something very important she wanted to do and she couldn't ask her husband to do it. So I came in that day and proceeded to write for her. She wrote letters to each of her daughters to be given to them on the day they turned 16, graduated from high school, got married and had their first baby. It was one of the most difficult days of my life. I went home after hours of quietly crying, completely emotionally exhausted. When I got to my room, David had left a dozen yellow roses by my door with a note telling me how much he loved me and that he knew I had had a hard day. I knew that he was the man for me. I had known it before, but that day, I knew he would take care of me and I loved him so much more. That young mother died a week later.

My Mom was talking to me about something the other day and I have thought about it a lot since then. In the "olden" days, people were laid out in the family room/living room of a house after they died. The family was forced to see death, feel it and begin to grieve. It was inevitable, you had to begin your grief process because it was physically present in your life. People don't experience this in our country anymore. We have become weak because of that. There are people that "don't want to remember their loved ones in that way (the hospital)" so they don't come to visit them. Then when that loved one dies, they feel sad, but a lot of times, they don't immediately feel the loss/grief because they haven't been present for a lot of the dying process. They put off their grief and eventually it catches up to them and rears it ugly head in other forms...addictions, broken down relationships, alone-ness. They search for something to "fulfill" them because they are not fulfilled by their present life and try to find something to blame, or someone. Grief is not something you can put off...you must deal with it. You must look it in the eyes and take it head on, or it will take control of you in other ways. The only thing you can do when you are feeling it is to process it in the way that only you can, and look to God when you get to the bottom. You have no where else to look, but up. So you do and you will eventually find that fulfillment you were so desperately searching for, but if you never do, you end up living with regrets, living a life of distance...from others and God. You lose a part of you.

So I am looking up. I am looking to God to take care of me, for my fulfillment. I know it is the only way for me to get through this, and I hope others will learn from my example.

On a separate note, please keep my Mother-in-law, Charlotte, in your prayers. She is undergoing chemo and radiation treatments and is having a hard time with them. Thank you so much for your love and prayers.