Dealing with Loss

Processing grief- Periodically I find I'm dealing healthily with the loss of so many who have died. I decided that maybe I could express better for myself by trying a new format and thereby find a way to move forward in my life and not stay frozen from just too many deaths around me of people I have been close with all my life.

How can you all go and leave me here to face life alone?
It was hard enough when you were alive.
Now it has become impossible to go on without you
The meaning that you brought to my life has gone with you
And I feel like a hollowed out log or a redwood tree whose insides are burned but still alive
How can I go on without all of you?

I choose to live on for children and wife and friends
But that doesn't mean it is a happy thing for me
Is the glass half empty or half full?
It depends upon the day
Am I alone or with one of my children, 2 of which live now far away from me

Most days I have enough money that I would have wanted when I was young and didn't
It's strange to have everything I once wanted but now it is 30 years too late to be very useful

So, good things come to him who waits. This is true.
The other thing that comes is loneliness.
I have been strong while others have just died
Some from old age and others from wear and tear

I have almost died many times
But God in his wisdom has seen fit to return me to the world of the living again and again
But not all the others
I have been to many funerals, many memorials the last 10 years
I have even cremated my mother and sailed with my family putting her to sea at Lover's Point where she wished to be

We cremated my wife's father and put him in St. Louis with his parents
He came to me the moment he died
And asked for my help
And I called the angels to come for him

They came while I was driving down a freeway in Los Angeles
I wondered if I should be driving with all this going on
My children were with me and I asked them to pray

I watched his parents and his two wives come for him
I watched him play with Shep his dog from his childhood
And when we put his ashes in the Ground in Saint Louis
Shep's fetching stick had been laid against his grave.

end


Later:

I read this to my wife over our cellphones as she headed to she our grief therapist. I had already realized that I was just processing to deeply my grief today for it to be useful to go and see him (at least for today). You have to be in a rational enough place for counseling to be useful, I find. When you are just too emotionally overwhelmed you just can't make useful conversation with anyone.

So, for me, it isn't just one death I'm processing, it is at least 20 people I loved and have been close to during my life from birth until now. Any one of them I could deal with. It's just that each new one is like the last straw that breaks the camel's back (me being the camel).

I often wondered in the past how some very old people seem to glow in the dark. I think now they have mastered the fact that life is the incoming and the outgoing. To experience all the births alongside of all the deaths one can become one of these magic old people. For me, there have just been too many deaths and not enough new births in my immediate family. My cousin has 10 grandchildren and I have none. Maybe this is part of the problem. However, I have chosen to live on for all those still alive that I love. I wish I could say I choose to live for me. But that hasn't been true ever since I was 18.