Making our way through the fog:

For many of us, as we’ve talked about before, the beginning of our grief journey happens in a fog. The early days, weeks and months especially, are times when our grief is in control of our lives and we are just being pushed from moment to moment and thing to thing with little or no thoughts or control of our own. 

As time passes, and our grief begins to become less demanding, we are faced with the daunting task of taking control of our lives back into our hands; of finding reasons to do so and of learning to make (good) decisions and chart new directions. Here are some things to think about as we go.

As an affirmation to start, please remember that no matter how it may feel at times, you’re not going crazy! Everything is ok to think and feel in our grief, but not necessarily ok to act upon.

With that said, please remember that negative thoughts and places can exist in grief. Please try to turn away from them. Don’t get stuck dwelling on them and don’t embrace or act on them just because they do come into your mind. Please remember to find help to do so if you can’t do it on your own.

Again, many of the things going through our minds during our grieving, especially in the “fog” of our early grief, may sometimes have us doubting our sanity. They may be so outside our normal experiences and ways of thinking and acting that we wonder if we will ever be able to, or want to, function or think clearly or “normally” again. 

Most of these difficult and odd things however, are direct effects of our grief and also of the inertia that lives within it. The good thing is, like the waves of grief, and the level of pain and sadness we experience early on, these things too tend to become less common and less severe over time. 

The Piñata effect:

It’s possible that grief acts like an “emotional stroke” where our thinking and emotions and feelings are disconnected from their normal pathways by the trauma and pain we have experienced with the passing of our loved ones. As with a physical stroke, we are, in a sense, debilitated for a time until we are able to re-train ourselves and find new pathways for our thoughts and emotions to accommodate and facilitate the changes and the new ways of thinking and feeling that our grief has brought us to.

To help me understand those types of disconnected and disoriented thoughts and feelings when I was experiencing them, I called what was happening to me the Piñata Effect:

Think of a piñata, that’s our minds, the stick is our bereavement. The stick strikes us in the moment of our loved ones passing and within a short time, everything inside, like the things inside the piñata, tumbles out of place, maybe onto the ground. If you try to pick it all up off of the ground and put it back inside the piñata in it’s original place, it probably won’t go back the way it came out. Things will get jumbled and twisted and some may not go back in at all. You may find you have “”extra parts”…. Or maybe it may seem that you don’t have enough parts….

In our minds, after things “tumble out” particularly during the disruptions of our earliest grief, we may not even recognize what is going on or what is happening to us in the fog it causes, because it’s all so different now. Things are in a different order, they are often not familiar to us and our normal thinking processes are disrupted and unrecognizable. 

So it’s not surprising that we can be confused or disoriented or sometimes unable to do even simple tasks until we find ways to reorder and realign our thoughts and feelings in a new way to accommodate what has happened in our minds and in our lives.

Giving a shit! 

Onward through the fog…

So, with all of these possible disruptions in our thoughts and feelings, in this new strangeness, it can sometimes be very hard to find the will to care about much of anything at all. We may begin to doubt that there is a good reason out there for us to even bother to try. Sometimes it may be that the realities, disruptions and disorientations from what has happened in our lives bring us to places where we just don’t seem to care anymore.

But it’s really another part of inertia that, as we look at our shattered lives, at the loss of not only our love but of our futures, that we sometimes can’t see a reason to look toward the future at all. It’s sometimes hard, if those feelings take you over, to not descend into some pretty heavy hopelessness and see no reason to do much of anything. You may not see it coming and you may not even recognize it for what it is when it happens.

But it’s important to remember that since we are not our grief, it may well be our grieving that makes us feel that way. It may be another form of mental inertia. 

If nothing else, I believe that our loved ones would want us to carry on, to find new reasons to live and grow and maybe more importantly, if the roles were reversed, we would want those things for them!

While we sometimes can’t see much reason to face and do the myriad of tasks, chores and responsibilities of living now that we are alone, part of the hope in hope and healing is that we will slowly learn to do those things despite our despair and loneliness; that we will slowly learn the skills and tasks it requires for us to go on living. And that we will also actually learn to care that we learn them and that we do them.

It’s important to hold on through those bleak times, through the “winter of our grieving”, to do the work and to move forward in small steps as we can. It is important to slog through the snow no matter how tired we feel and how hopeless it looks.

And one day, out of seemingly nowhere, we may see a small fire burning in the distance that we can head toward, embrace and allow it’s heat and light to begin to warm us and heal us. To let us find the strength within ourselves to survive, and not just to survive, but to begin to grow and live again. 

It is important to do whatever it takes to build hope and healing within our shattered hearts, emotions and lives. Our loved ones would want us to do so. As we’ve talked about often, with time, the waves of grief become less high. They also come less often and we start to be able to catch our breaths between waves. In the same way, the hopeless thoughts and days also come less often. We can slowly move from grief being in control of our lives to beginning to let healing in.

Further along, if not the sun, we can at least begin to see the light behind the clouds and the promise that some day, some time, some how, the clouds might actually part and some light will come back into our lives. We can begin to feel that the storm will finally pass and that gentle, calming swells of life will replace the intensity and turbulence of our grief. We can start to live again and begin building the next part of our lives.

Picking up the pieces, taking on the tasks and going forward anyway: Just a few material world things and a few mental/emotional things to consider:

In most long-term relationships, things that need to be done are almost always shared out between the two spouses or partners. There is always a list of things to do in our lives but now, while that list continues, we often have little or no energy or interest to get up and do them. But, all the material tasks and jobs and repairs and that endless-seeming list of things life always gives us to do must be done by us, on our own. If we don’t know how to do them, we may need to find and be willing to accept help to do them. Especially in the fog!

We can also find endless reasons to not do things too, including not really caring whether they get done or not. It’s a time when the inertia within our grief brings us thoughts like: I can’t, I don’t want to, I don’t know how, I won’t, and it’s too hard, and those thoughts can take us over and keep us stagnant if we let them.

But if we are honest with ourselves, we can come to see that now we have a responsibility to ourselves and others to maintain both our material world and our emotional world. We have a responsibility to ourselves and to others to keep the material world needs of our lives moving forward and not allow them to stop or atrophy or deteriorate and fail because we can’t find the energy or will to do them. 

Most of us probably aren’t in a position to replace the major material things in our lives because we didn’t take care of them. And if we weren’t the one doing things before, we eventually have to learn to do all that stuff too and we eventually have to be the onesto do them no matter how we feel.

Finding the energy, self confidence and will to take on those responsibilities and then getting them done, are all very difficult things to accomplish but are also very important parts of the reconstruction we have ahead of us.

Making decisions without our loved ones, a mental/emotional thing:

In most long-term relationships, there are not only shared tasks, there are also many shared decisions. We discuss things and we decide together what we want to do or how we want to proceed or do things. There are also the individual decisions we usually make based on our individual roles within our marriages or partnerships. 

As hard as it is now to do what had been our own decision making, during our bereavement, we also need to learn to do all the decision making we used to share. Especially if the person who is no longer there was making most of the decisions about a particular part of our lives together, we now have to pick up the ball and without the support or help from that person, we get to do it ourselves…. 

How do we do that???? 

This is a daunting task with no easy or convenient solutions. I found it to be and it still is one of the most difficult things I have to do. It’s also one of the things I find I miss most often as I’m building this part of my life. As it is with material tasks, I think that it’s ok to ask for help. It’s ok to allow, and sometimes delegate, trusted friends and family to help us do some of the tasks and make some of the decisions if they are available to help. It’s also ok to let them help make some of the decisions along with us. It’s even ok to let them help us to learn how to make decisions (again) on our own. 

It would be good however, to try to make sure that what ever decisions are made, that they are our decisions if we can, because in the end we have to live with them and the consequences of them.

Questions: 

• Have you felt hopelessness while trying to see a path going forward or of finding a way of dealing with the changes in your lives?

• Can you find ways to go forward despite feeling hopeless sometimes?

• How might you begin to overcome hopelessness if you are feeling it?

• Do you think your responsibility to others is an important component of the healing process?

• If you have begun to take on the tasks and make the decisions you used to share, what strategies have you used and how might you continue the process? 

• What help can we offer each other about learning to do these things ourselves as we begin to actively live again?

• What have you had to learn to do that you never did before?

• How did you figure out how to do it?

• How did it make you feel when you actually did it successfully? Or not successfully?

• How are you doing at learning to make decisions on your own?

• Did you find you had (have) issues with self confidence?

• What might have caused them?

• How does it make you feel to have to make decisions on your own?

• How does it make you feel when you make a good decision?