Losing a Parent

Listening to the radio...the host is talking about how she lost her parent...and how she walked through her grief. As a psycho therapist, she felt compelled to seek out help and support for herself. She mentioned that in other cultures it is a "given" that everyone take at least one year to grieve before they even think about getting back into what would resemble a "normal" life. She also admitted that the first year (or more) she would frequently find herself howling- yep howling- as she walked around her house. Her therapeutic training taught her that she HAD to get what she was feeling out of her system and let it flow through. That seems perfectly reasonable to me. That we want to howl and wail and gnash is true. Whether we allow ourselves to take that cathartic emotional dump or not seems key to regaining/maintaining balance and emotional stability.

You never hear people say they HOWL...most hide behind a facade of emotional vacuousness. As my cousin Lori says humans drift in the shallows in a raft on the river of denial. Who admits they're in pain? We think no one wants to hear it and truth is... raw expressions of emotion make most folks REALLY uncomfortable. We're experts at offering platitudes of upliftment.. but who are we trying to relieve with our words? The person who is grieving or our own uncomfortability with their nakenessness? I have discovered, through first hand experience with death, that when I've been in that numb space there are no words that can save me- let alone pierce the outer wall of my inertia. And that's why grief borders on depression.

When my father died, I'd go through waves of emotion. One minute I'd be fine and the next my stomach would knot up. I'd feel a wave of nausea hit me. Interestingly, these waves had absolutely nothing to do with what I was thinking at the moment. Just BANG! Seasickness...stomach rolls. Whatever it is running through me, I'm pretty sure that if I can't predict when this wave of emotion is coming or going, it's so unconscious that the LEAST I can do is try to let it just roll through. Otherwise, I'm pretty sure that if I try to block it or stiffle it...odds are good that it's going to bite me in the ass latter in the form of physical illness from repression. So I'm not willing to go there.

When we lose a parent we are dealing with primal issues and it's ok to be broken and suffer. We need to go underground for a while to feel stuff. It's deep and profound and doesn't have a time limit on it. We're allowed to grieve.

Eye yi yi yie...