Our lives today are a bit more scattered than they were say three or four months ago, due of course to the world being on lock down due to the novel corona-virus. I take it like most major events in history; everyone will have a different tale of how it came into our lives, be it as simple as being upset with the lock down and the state of affairs to losing a loved one.
No matter what it is we feel we have lost, there is always a path we must follow if we are to let it go and keep going, for anything that feels like an actual loss, the term grieving usually suffices. Be it a minor inconvenience or a major loss, the reason we have the feelings we do is because there is indeed a sense of something being missing, like that weird empty hole in our gum lines as kids when we would lose a tooth; it just feels wrong.
I also think ‘how’ we grieve is just as important as how we live, and ‘how’ we move forward from such times are how we continue to keep on living as well.
Recently the thoughts above have been on my mind as two people who are very dear to me stand the chance of not being here this time next year, and although the causes of this are not related to the ongoing pandemic, the fact there may not even be services for those I might lose means it still does rear its head in this situation and could possibly make a bad situation worse. That got me thinking about how we process grief and I think like many things it can be a matter of experience. Personally, I have seen quite a lot of grief in a short span of time. It never makes it easier but having faced it before does make it so you know what to expect in those kinds of situations.
I suppose the method is an old one, tried and true and sound, although it does not take way any of the hard steps you must take to come out the other side of the unpleasant event, but it does lessen the blow that you take the first time you face major adversity.
Either way the road is rough, ragged, and full of dust, but it is possible to walk along and find an exit, and you start turning by finding the best and brightest bits of what it is that you have lost and making sure it never dies for as long as you remain standing on any road, any path, no matter how dusty and ragged it may be.
All that matters is that we continue to walk that road, step after step, day after day, lest we stop walking completely and that is worse than any other loss, the sense of self that is all we truly are and that anyone we care for would want to survive no matter what.
