Grief Is Strange

It’s odd how grief hides and then pops up in unexpected ways and places. Like the other day when I was getting ready to host a small party for a friend. I got down my great-grandmother’s platter which always held the Thanksgiving turkey and suddenly a memory hit me. “I’m going to cry,” I said out loud. The sudden stab was remembering, and missing, my formal dining room with its 11-foot ceiling and all the meaning my former house had for me. A small thing, yes, but a grief nonetheless.

One grief tends to trigger another, and suddenly I’m thinking about the painful time of my divorce, and then the damage it caused particularly to our son…and then I’m right back in the middle of his tragic illness and death. All this in seconds wile I’m standing in my kitchen alone, getting ready for a party. Wow.

Those things, plus a lingering fatigue with no physical cause, led me back to counseling/therapy, which I’d not done for many years. I’m too old, I’d rationalized. I’ve already had a million years of therapy. I can’t afford it. I should be able to handle all this myself.

I’m grateful that the gifted woman is still practicing, and that one session has already helped. Maybe I’m in a safe enough place now to get to a deeper place of healing. I hope so.