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?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

I write for me but I care what my readers think. Please be polite and no scamming.

Popular posts from this blog

Polyethylene Packaging - a Dark Times Journal entry

Image
I was in the fourth grade when our family moved from El Paso, Texas to Albuquerque, New Mexico. We moved because I could not breathe the air there. I want to say they cracked petroleum there. But what did I know beyond the sky was sometimes yellow and I could not breathe. Mom was pregnant with Debbie, and Gary and I rode in the backseat separated by a round tank full of Dad's tropical fish. Dad had a job with Sealright, Inc which made paper milk cartons. Sealright was a polyethylene packing subsidiary of Phillips 66. The petroleum company. I was rather proud of myself for learning to say that, and to not laugh when adults would stare at me not knowing what to ask about that. Albuquerque smelled better. Then. Before all the freeways were built and the shape of the valley trapped the exhaust down near the ground in the winter months. We lived in the foothills. I could breathe. I learned that if I could see the air I could not. Still it was better than El Paso though I missed our trip...
Read more

Swimming

Image
For much of my college career my fitness workout was swimming on the B squad of the swim team. I remember it as the days before heated pools and women coaches. I also remember being so exhausted and cold I could only lean against the shower wall and throw up. Not exactly warm fuzzy images but I was in awesome shape. Needless to say it did not leave me with a overpowering desire to swim laps. Point of fact for years my swimming became really informal: Swimming to shore after the canoe tipped over, challenging my sister once a summer to across the lake and back, seeing how long I could back float without moving a muscle, and a scuba course. I also played around with other ways of staying fit: aerobics, bicycling, jogging, skiing and dance classes. All of which seem to be bad for the knees, back or feet. After my ski accident my physical therapist steered me back to the pool. Damn if I was going to swim laps! However, aqua fit was just getting rather seriously taken so I took it. It r...
Read more

The Pruning the Crown of Thorns

Image
Crown of Thorns Before I am a lover of Euphorbias . They are from the deserts of Southern Africa and Madagascar. They have evolved physical characteristics and forms similar to cacti of North and South America and are often incorrectly referred to as cacti. My big Crown of Thorns was one of my first of a growing collection of these succulents from the spurge family of Euphorbiaceae. I picked it up as a 6 inch plant in a New Iberia nursery when my sister and I were touring the northern gulf coast. I believe that was 15 years ago. I made an attempt at limiting its height a few years back to allow it to devote more energy to the new branches and make it a denser plant. That failed. And the height of the plant continued to challenge the window space and soon the long branches were leaning over and leaning against the window. I googled and found the proper way to prune this treasured plant. Still it was very difficult to cut off the four longer branches. Even with a plan. The f...
Read more