La Vida Va (1)

Life goes on. In moments of loss and grief this is often hard to say or hear. We all have faced loss and grief at some point in our lives. Some not so harsh and others life altering. My most profound experience came in 2005 with my youngest son, Jacob’s, passing. I am not here to tell anyone how to grieve as that is a most personal and individually unique experience. However, I do want to share with you some of the moments of awareness that the experience brought me to and through.

First and foremost, again, it is your experience – different from anyone else – even your closest family and friends, and no one gets to tell you how that is supposed to look and feel.

The second was an ah-ha moment I had while reading a book called, The Grief Recovery Handbook, by John W. James and Russell Friedman, 1998. In this book I came across two exercises that have you first graph all the losses you have experienced in your life, the second to graph the relationship with one of those losses, and what you find are all the memories that you carry with that relationship. In the second, looking closely at those memories, you then start to see all the unfinished life experiences that you expected to have with that person and realize that is what you have lost and are grieving. This just seemed to make so much sense to me and helped me to bring the presence of my son into every future experience that he would have shared with me. It showed me how life goes on.

La Vida va…  

hasta luego…