First You Must Grieve

Through a Fog

 All life is about loss. It is what life is. You cannot move forward without leaving something behind. And not all things we leave behind are abandoned with joy. And even then we must grieve that loss. 

 We, as a culture, turn things into celebrations be it graduating from college or getting married. A friend who was living in Japan gave me a wedding Kimono upon my marriage to my last husband. It was red and white. Red for the celebration of my new family and white for the grieving of the family I was leaving. I was a modern woman and my parents were dead, his mother didn't even attend so I didn't get the significance then. 

 It is only now I see all new steps as a leaving behind of something else. We cannot always be dragging behind the weight of our pasts. I hate being told to hurry up or to get over it. Move on. Moving forward is not as easy as slamming a door shut. You must say goodbye. You must grieve. Or at sometime in the future the past will extract its due. And we each have our own timeline. Each bit of past we put behind us has a different weight or significance. And the same thing for me might be more significant than for you. 

 At a 50 year reunion of high school I found some of my former friends had not left those years behind. Had not put them in the past so they could move forward. One high school hero declared those three years the best of his life. They were probably the worst of mine.

 As 2016 ends and we move into the uncertain future of 2017 we must grieve what was and what might have been. It won't be. But we must do it in our own time. Not on a schedule set by others. Dreams which die are sometimes the hardest things to leave behind.

Comments

  1. The Blog of BeeJanuary 3, 2017 at 6:36 AM

    You speak so much truth you made me cry. I am already very tired of people telling what I should do and shouldn't do now that a new year is here. How I should move on, go to the gym, join this club and that club and be the strong person that everyone 'knows' me to be. If I had wanted to go to the gym and join a couple of clubs, I would have done it long before now. How can I now, just because it's a new year, do a make over and move on. Thirty three years of my life left me only seven weeks ago and I am supposed to move on?

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