Good Mourning Grief

A blog about my adventures as a grief warrior

Tag: #love

Letting Love Ease Grief

November 13, 2022 /

I’m not sure who dictates how much goes onto one person’s plate, but I wish they’d recalculate. This year has been brutal on our family.  The loss of Dan, my cancer, the loss of Kim, the life and death health struggles of close friends, and now two more friends want to check out.

We heard of their desire back in the spring. Both suffer major health ailments and life is no longer the quality they hope for. After much conversation, we convinced them to investigate moving back to Calgary into an assisted living community and enjoy our health care support as well as the love of their family and friends here.  They liked that idea. I was relieved. We found a place and made plans to fly them out to see it. These are lifetime friends who, when we are together, none of us remember that our health is crappy, and we are in pain.  There is laughter and shared memories and time flies in their company.  Their friendship is therapeutic. This was a good solution for however many days or years they have left here. Then we got a call from their son. Assisted death is back on the table.  Why?

A cat scan showed two more tumors in our friend. He is done. He is too tired to struggle for the slim chance that he may last a couple more years. His life has been a good one and he wishes to go out on his own. She feels the same way about her health, although hers is better.  I think it is that she does not want to be here without him.  They are two peas in a pod and have never been separated.

There is a part of me that gets this and then there is the selfish side of me that screams, NO. I don’t want anymore loss in my life. Especially when it is chosen. I don’t want to have to be at another funeral and taking care of estates and personal wills (we are the executors) and selling their home. I am sick. I don’t have enough energy to get out of bed lately.  I can’t do this. Grief steps in and blinds me. It zaps the energy and the understanding that I have friends who are suffering and want to end it.

Grief is a personal journey, and can be at times, a selfish journey. When it is loud, it consumes us to think only of ourselves; that life is unfair, we are hard done by and why me.  It is at this time, that we must stop and let love come in. Love takes grief into its arms and holds it.  It whispers, “everything will be ok.  We got this.” It opens our eyes to a larger understanding and stirs up empathy within our hearts to listen and not judge. Love can calm grief.

So, I sit in my chair, and I listen to love. I think of the many wonderful memories I will always have. I feel gratitude that I have these friends and I ask for strength to be with them when they carry out their wishes. I feel my grief lessen and the energy I will need peeks over the distant horizon of my own anguish. I tell grief that I am aware it does not leave and thank it for momentarily letting love ease its sharp edges.

Preplans of our Souls

October 24, 2021 /

It is said that we arrive on earth having already chosen our family and our path as part of what we need to learn and to teach with our days here on earth.  When that is achieved, we leave.  Earth is a school of the spiritual realm.  And a very difficult one at best.

Understanding soul plans brings some peace to me.  We fret over the questions of why and what if, that allude to “how could I have controlled this from happening?”  Soul plans remind us we have no control over such.  Our power of control has only the capacity to strive towards our desires, our goals, choosing our actions and our reactions to what we meet on our path.  The big picture we had already planned.

The people who we meet, our families, our friends, even our associates, play a part in shaping us. If we are open to when these people arrive and how we feel around them we begin to understand ourselves better.  We begin to see patterns of behavior that we can reinforce or remove. Our connections, on a soul level, are to bring us enlightenment. I think that is a pretty cool concept. Who doesn’t want to be a better version of themselves?  Who doesn’t want peace and purpose?  According to soul plans, the idea to embrace what life gives you and learn from it and share this with others is why we are here.

I have had mothers ask me, if this is true, why would I choose to be a grieving mother?  To which I reply, why would your child have chosen you?

If soul plans exist, I can’t imagine how that conversation would go. This tiny spirit had an agreement with you to come here as your child, knowing they would leave first.   Who would agree to such pain? And yet, here we are.  I wonder if the mother in our soul, the caregiver we are, agreed because of love. Perhaps we knew this child would need us in the most universal way and we agreed because of love. And perhaps, just as big, we needed them. This love transcended across the realms into this life as mother and son. Love was what brought us together, to experience a multitude of emotions, learning and supporting each other’s spirit to grow.

Pondering this, I wrote a letter to Zane.

“…If what I read is true; if we as spirits make a plan before we arrive on earth as humans, we knew each other before we were mother and son.  We each had our lesson to learn, and we chose each other to come together to experience this. Your life of adventure and discovery and pushing the limits, an example to the rest of us, a reminder to live life fully. What lessons you taught us.  Thank you. And what, my sweet son, were the lessons you learned…”

We will never know if a soul plan is a real thing.  For me, I try to put the why am I in this role on a shelf.  I am not sure it will ever make sense. But the idea that I had known Zane before brings hope I will play another role with him again.

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