Thursday, September 20, 2012

Ways We Grieve

I've spent the last few days wandering in and out of extreme grief. I can't count the number of times I've cried. I think yesterday I can only count the few moments when I didn't.

But all people aren't like me. My daughter and I are similar in this--cry all at once, for as long as it takes, and sob at every opportunity, telling the whole world how awful we feel that our little fuzzy kitty is dead. Even now tears are welling in my eyes...

My son has cried, too, though he also runs away from it (or from us when we dissolve into tears). He can only take so much, and he doesn't feel comfortable with the same loss of control. But then he comes back to it, again and again. I found him this morning, still in his bed, tears in his eyes.

My husband holds it all still deeper. His way of grieving? He cleaned up the litter box, donated Skooker's bed, cat litter, and huge bag of food to the vet who took such care of the little one, and picked up Skooker's neatly swaddled body and buried it beautifully in the back yard, with bricks embedded in the soil to mark where our little kitty lies.

His grieving is most useful... I just hope it serves him as well as my sobbing helps me.

I think it helps him grieve. But it also comforts me, and that act of love is one of the reasons I so dearly love my husband.

Thank you to everyone for your kind comments. You have also comforted me, and I've read your comments to my husband, too, to help him.

What is it, friends, that you believe most helps you through the grieving process? I would love to know.

3 comments:

  1. So sorry for the loss of your kitty. My heart goes out to you. I found that only time helps the process.

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  2. Long answer short...empathy for others who are going through a time of grieving and objectivity towards death in it's myriad of methods. I am not jaded about death of any creature but I have seen it up close and personal so many times in so many ways that if I didn't develop a certain immunity to death and the process of dying, coming to understand that it is the one inescapable event, I would have been honestly insane by now.

    06 did it for me 9 funerals, 6 suicides. I built a wall thick and tall that year.

    ON another note you might like this guy, I thought of you when I read this post of his aboutShakespeare

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  3. I always try to focus on what I loved, what a gift to me that individual was when alive, the humor, what I learned, what they taught me.

    When I spend all my time thinking about what I loved about them when they were alive, they don't seem so dead.

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