A girlfriend reminded me of something I told her. I said, “I am broken. I will always be broken. And I am trying to learn how to live broken.” She brought it up in the context of us moving away from Zane’s childhood home and that this would be a good thing for me. She said, “It’s time for you to heal, to move on”.
We have all received the comments, “it’s time to move on” or “she wouldn’t want you to be sad” or my favorite, “I need you to be the same person you were before”-there’s a concept!
Although painful, I realize these types of comments come from the heart. Friends and family care and they don’t want to see me hurting. They too miss Zane. And they miss who I was before he was killed. None of us like change and death is the biggest change of them all.
What they don’t realize is that you can’t fix this. Death has put us into a state of grief for the remainder of our days. Some days will be better than others. Some days will bring laughter and joy…I look forward to that. Some days, actually a portion of every day, I am not ok. Something comes along and reminds me I am broken. Something shows up to remind me I am not, and cannot, be the same person I was.
The simple fact is we are broken. We can’t get over it or get past it. We are broken. What we do with our brokenness is what is important. How we bring daily practices and new ways of being into our lives is what will help soften our grief. But remove it? Put it behind us? That is not possible. Grief will always be a part of our new make-up. It is the other side of love and we have loved deep, therefore we will grieve deep.
And that’s ok. Grief is hard work and part of the work is accepting our brokenness. If you try to hide or fight it or ignore it, it will hit you harder and in many ways. By accepting it, I can face it and then I am able to explore ways that it will fit into my life such that I am not a blubbery angry mess every hour.
When something is broken and you glue the pieces back together, it is not the same as the original beautiful piece. With care and love and time, it can take a different, but still beautiful shape. Friends and family need to give us patience, and a lot of it, as we redefine ourselves to accommodate our grief and develop into a person that carries brokenness with individual style and grace.
Love you Janica.