So that when I break down upon reading a Khaled Hosseini, and cry bitterly like a child, there’s someone to take me in his arms and just hold me in silence until I’m done.
True story.
Tag Archives: grief
After
Some days there are no answers and no hope. Just a blind, unyielding hurt that doesn’t fade and sends the heart beating itself senselessly against walls again.
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5th Stage of Grief – Acceptance
“Acceptance is often confused with the notion of being “all right” or “OK” with what has happened. This is not the case. Most people don’t ever feel OK or all right about the loss of a loved one. This stage is about accepting the reality that our loved one is physically gone and recognizing that this new reality is the permanent reality. We will never like this reality or make it OK, but eventually we accept it. We learn to live with it. It is the new norm with which we must learn to live. We must try to live now in a world where our loved one is missing. In resisting this new norm, at first many people want to maintain life as it was before a loved one died. In time, through bits and pieces of acceptance, however, we see that we cannot maintain the past intact. It has been forever changed and we must readjust. We must learn to reorganize roles, re-assign them to others or take them on ourselves.
Finding acceptance may be just having more good days than bad ones. As we begin to live again and enjoy our life, we often feel that in doing so, we are betraying our loved one. We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time.
At times, people in grief will often report more stages. Just remember your grief is an unique as you are.”
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Quotidian
“The only place as comforting as a friendly bookstore is probably your grandmother’s kitchen. The sight of shelves packed with books of all kinds, the smell of printed paper and coffee, and the secret rustle of of the characters that live in the pages warm up any heart. I go to Book Passage to pass the time, to read, to gossip, and to lift my spirit. But I have also gone there to share my sorrow, as I did when I was grieving for my daughter’s death. At the store, amid all those books, many of which were painful memoirs, I realized that I had to write Paula’s story, as others had written about their broken hearts before me. During that terrible year of mourning I spent many hours at Book Passage writing by hand, sipping tea, and wiping my tears, supported by my friends at the store who kept me company while respecting my privacy.”
-Isabel Allende, My Bookstore: Writers Celebrate their Favorite Places to Browse, Read, and Shop
Coffee Girl 