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Health & Fitness

Finding Solace From Grief in the Circles of Life

How Mother's Day feels differently once your mom is gone.

I've been sick the last couple of days.  Part of it is a cold.  I know this because my nose is stuffy and I keep sneezing.  Or maybe it's allergies, who cares.  All I know is that I feel crummy.  Plus, this recent cloudy and cold weather seems to have seeped into my bones and I can't get warm. No amount of snuggie blankets or fuzzy socks can help.  Since my husband typically runs at around 100 degrees, I've tried to wrap myself around him, my frozen tentacles clinging to all of his warm spots like hungry parasites but still, I am cold. 

Along with my freezing extremities and chest congestion, I'm terribly sad, as I have been every year around Mother's Day since my mom died.  Mother's Day is like my grief's version of a monkey on my back.  I just can't seem to shake it.  I can handle her birthday and Christmas and MY birthday and every other day of the year but Mother's Day? Fuugetaboutit.

Part of me enjoys it because it feels good to purge all of those feelings that I tend to bottle up over time.  But this moment of missing her is so intense that it takes my breath away. It's not nearly as bad as when she first passed and it doesn't happen often but when it does, it's overpowering ... like someone simultaneously electrocutes me and kicks me in the stomach and I fall to the ground barely  able to move or speak or function. Time seems to stop and all I can do is try to get through the pain.

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I've been reading C.S. Lewis' "A Grief Observed." No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear.  I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid.  The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning.  I keep on swallowing..."  Yes, that's the whole title of the book.  It sounds crazy unless you've experienced loss and then and only then do you know that grief can't be summed up in a short title.

I should have read this book three years ago although I fear that I would have agreed so much with him in our mutual despair that it might have caused me to wallow in the grief much longer. Plus, I simply wouldn't have understood his point of view about his way out of grief, much like a woman in the throws of gut-wrenching labor could never understand how the pain does eventually stop.  I simply would have never believed it.

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The one thing I still struggle with is why the grief keeps circling around me.  Why do I keep revisiting this pain? Why am I so sadistic to myself, shouldn't I just let it go? Get over it?  It's like an ever swirling vortex where I keep going around and around and every time I reach a certain point I stop and rip open the would all over again.  For what purpose?

I think C.S. Lewis explains perfectly when he makes the analogy of a person who has lost a limb.  That person may recover, the pain may subside and he may get up and start wobbling around with a wooden leg.  He'll get up and get on with it yet nothing, NOTHING can ever make him whole again and he will always suffer that loss, grieve that loss and even feel the physical pain of it from time to time.

This is comforting to me because it makes me feel like I'm not pouring salt in the wound for nothing,that this circling around is not in vain, that I am normal for doing it and that it's even healthy to acknowledge it. 

I spend so much time trying to look away from it, afraid that I will fall deep into that pit of despair if I pay it any attention but it's comforting to see it for what it is, pain...pain that will never go away.

I always love when another writer perfectly sums up my feelings because it sort of takes the pressure of of me.  Like I have an itch and I just can't seem to reach it but then someone else comes along and scratches just in the right spot and there is ecstacy.  C.S. Lewis says it perfectly in this paragraph:

"Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared.  I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation.  I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one."

For those of you who have lost your mothers, I encourage you to still celebrate them this Sunday.  Buy them a card and sign it.  Buy them flowers and set them somewhere you can smell them every day.   And for the rest of you, do me a little favor, share in a tradition my mom and I used to share.  Give your mom a minute hug, one that lasts for a full minute.  It doesn't sound like much but just wait and see how it seems like an eternity.  Savor it, take a deep breath, smell her, feel her and love her. 

Happy Mother's Day!

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