Good Mourning Grief

A blog about my adventures as a grief warrior

Tag: #memory

A Chapter in Our Tapestry

September 1, 2024 /

When you live with grief, you are always looking for new and neat ways to honor your loved one.  Recently, we were asked to send in a story about a friend who is dying. His wife is collecting them to make them into a beautiful keepsake book. The story can be an experience you had or a moment in time with them, something that illustrates their relationship to you. The idea is that when the stories are combined it will create a portrait of who this person was. It is a thoughtful, wonderful, creative idea. The challenge is what ONE story could possibly explain the entire lifetime of happiness this person brought.  After all, how do you explain the brilliance of Geoff?

Tapestry is a funny word. But it accurately describes how Geoff fits into our life. He has always been there. We were introduced to Geoff as a four-month-old bouncy boy, whose mother came over to have coffee and meet Zane.  His mother and I became fast friends, two women raising two adventurous boys.

They grew up together. Living across the street from one another, Geoff was a part of our daily life. The boys played together, catching grasshoppers in the field, counting how many glass bottles they could break before I caught them. They learned to ride bikes, play hockey, video games, and walked together to their first day of kindergarten.  They were inseparable. They ran away together, got into trouble together (having fun in the discovery of how fast and furious dryer lint can burn!). They explored life fully with a gaggle of buddies included.

“You got a friend in me” is the philosophy of Geoff. Quietly teaching one how to tie their shoelace or drive a stick shift or face loss with honor. I learned from Geoff that it is ok to tell ‘skip the dishes’ to drop the food at the door and leave, because you don’t want to interact. I learned that a good shot of tequila can make things better. Although, he told me, “I am not a purist but that’s ok”, because I prefer chocolate tequila. And I learned from him that a hug says that I love you.

Geoff’s dark sense of humor makes it impossible to be mad and it generates energy where the entire room laughs. Even when facing cancer, he has that sense of wit. When he took me out for coffee to tell me he had a brain tumor, I asked what his fears about this diagnosis were. He said he didn’t want to lose his eyebrows.

Our families have shared the highs and lows of life together. And with each memory my heart laughs at the joy that Geoff has brought us. And I am forever grateful for the love that he has shared with us. How lucky we are to have him as part of our family’s tapestry.

I Always Remember How You Like Your Coffee

November 9, 2020 /

Zane’s friends wanted to come to his celebration wearing his favorite color.  The consensus was blue. Then it changed to dress blue or dress how you think Zane wanted you to dress.  The joke was who would come naked.  Thankfully, no one did. I remember thinking to myself, is that his favorite color? Oh yes, yes, of course it was.  What was I thinking?  Memory goes out the window when you are fresh in your grief.  And we struggle with it forever after that.

Forgetting the little details of our loved one is one of the biggest fears.  We want, need, to remember their laugh, their face, their voice.  Grief does give you a foggy memory and that creates worry that we will wake up one day and the memories of our loved one has faded. 

It is compounded by the awkwardness of others not wanting to bring up your loved one’s name.  There is a hesitation of including them in present conversation when their physical life here is in the past.   But if we believe they are always a part of our life, then they should be included.  And the more we talk about them, the more we remember.  And that is a good thing.

Then there’s the tricky concept, do we remember correctly?  It goes to say if I acknowledge that I am having trouble remembering current things, then how do I remember the past with accurate detail?

I remember my mother started speaking of things about my father after he passed that I doubted were true.  I would call my sister to say, “hey mom said this….is that what really happened?”  Usually it didn’t or it was a twisted version of the truth.  We would laugh.  Maybe the fact my mother ended up with Alzheimer’s made it worse.  I’m sure it did.  But you get the point. Our memories don’t get sharper with age.

So how do we keep the details of our loved one from becoming fuzzy? 

Start writing! We need to record all that we wish to hold onto. Start a list of their favorites, their milestones, their habits, hobbies and dreams.  Maybe it’s a journal or a list on paper or a video you do.  Maybe it’s a letter you write to them to capture the favorite memories.  Whatever you choose to use and the style to record isn’t the focus; it’s having it captured to ensure that when we are having a moment we can go back to it and remember with clarity.

Is it important to have clarity? I believe it is another way to honor our loved one.  Zane insisted on having 3 sugars and lots of cream in his morning coffee. Every time I make my coffee, I think of that.  It makes me smile. There was more cream than coffee in his mug. Our loved one’s life had value here.  They made mistakes, they had accomplishments, and they had a personality, a way of doing things that made us laugh and cry. The details should be remembered vividly, as it is the details that make them so very special.

Remembering Autumn Leaves

September 28, 2020 /

As I walk our dog in the park, the ground is covered with the colored leaves of Autumn.  As his little feet toddle along our path, the rustling sound of the leaves pulls me back to a time when Zane was just three.

We would walk down to the neighbourhood park while we waited for dinner to cook. Together, we would make big piles of fallen leaves and then jump into them, lying on our backs and laughing.  We would look up at the skies and take turns pointing at clouds and naming what they looked like. 

I can still remember the crunch of the dried leaves underneath us.  The musty smell of the ground tickled our noses.  The sound of Zane’s young giggle as he jumped back up to say;

“Mimi, let’s do one mo time.”

I can remember the deep joy, the love of those afternoons together. He was my little buddy; it was the two of us. The memory of those fall afternoons live with vivid detail forever in my heart.

This particular memory hit me hard this season.  I am not sure why.  I have walked through the leaves many times before.  But this time, something about that memory filled my heart with the cold ache of missing the past.

Grief has no pattern of what memory may bring comfort and what memory may bring you to your knees.  Memories often come in random fashion and the day, the mood, the level of grief has the memory leaving you smiling or crying or both.  It is called ‘riding the wave of grief’. Sometimes it is a gentle whisper. Sometimes it is a hurricane, crashing in and leaving you to gasp for breath.  There is no play book of which memory will come in as a whisper and which will come in as a storm.  There is no set schedule. We must be ready for either. 

I hope that your memories fall gently this season.

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