Carol
I am so sorry to read this and learn of your loss. It is heart breaking. You are here and we all share your grief and loss because we’ve suffered it and continue to suffer. There are no short cuts with grief. It is personal. Each and everyone has their own way of experiencing grief and finding answers that are personal to us and our loved one.
On August 7, 2011 at 6pm two hours after Donna died in hospice I called a friend to tell him. He said the following. “Do not deny or run from your pain and grief, examine it and live with it. That is the only way to find a way through.” I became an active participant in my grieving and mourning. That was my key. Attack and understand my loss my grief my memories.
The following is from a book I am penning about my loss and my grief. I will share it to help you and those here but would hope they are not copied and distributed until the book is completed and published. For now this may serve as a compass for you to find your way.
"As transient as they are, memories pollute our daily lives, asphyxiating our past, present, and future. Even the simple exercise of sharing memories, intended to refresh our sense of hope, is the fraudulent intimacy of a beggars cup of coins ringing silently on the street. Shared memories are selfies demonstrating life among the living and lacking depth beyond the width of pixel. In the end, these are only moments in time and do not tell the entire story."
"I am powerless over my grief. Through this book I’ve done a searching and fearless inventory of my memories and my grief in order to reallocate the disparate memories of Donna and me to drive life forward. I daily return to the muscle memory of my grief in what I see around my home what I remember and what was done and not done. All of this feels like shards of bone in her ashes. They are the sharpe edges in my mind that cut me daily. I look at these photos with my eyes and feel the memories with my heart. There was and is no fog of grief. Individually each memory is clear. All these memories and images put into one place opens a door to see what I have not seen."
"Donna loved me into being. I liked what she saw in me. That mirror is lost forever. That self impression is fading without reinforcement. That is not to say I am not whole or complete but I do not see myself. As of yet I do not see what am I, what I’ve become, what I will become. At some point and in some fashion I need to let go of who I thought I was to become who I am. I am not abandoning the past and all that precedes this. I am recalibrating me through the memories."