Grief
No one teaches us how to grieve.
The Grief Experince
The first person I ever consciously grieved was my big sister Diane who passed away from ovarian cancer at are 44. The experience with at home hospice is part of the reason I have begun death doula training. There’s something beautiful about being there for someone as they die. It’s a months long process, sometimes years. With cancer in particular we can experience anticipatory grief.
Anticipatory grief
Anticipatory grief is grief that occurs before death. Most people expect to feel grief after a death but fewer are familiar with grief that shows up before a life ends. An example of this would be watching as my sister’s health declined knowing she would die. There’s a lot of anger associated with this kind of grief. It’s perfectly normal.
Grief doesn’t occur in isolation. One loss can bring to light memories of past losses, so that you're not grieving just the present loss, but all the losses that came before it.
Diane, me and mother in front of my mother’s childhood home in Jamaica W.I. This was to be the last trip we would take together as a family. The cancer treatments had stopped as she was declared terminal 6 months prior.
Grief is like a wound. At first, it’s open, bleeding, raw and terrify painful. In time, that wind begins to heal. It heals from the inside out. The pain begins to fade and eventually a scar is formed. I have a scar on my head that I’ve had since I was nine years old. I am and I don’t know, but when I touch that scar it feels different than the rest of my body.
Grief is like that. There will always be a scar. You will never be the same again. I have a scar on my head that I’ve had since I was nine years old. I am 45 years old now, but when I touch that scar it feels different than the rest of my body.
Grief is like that. There will always be a scar. We will never be the same again
Healing From Grief
Healing ourselves from. The wound of grief means letting yourself feel the pain, recognize how you’re feeling, cry, experience the intensity of the moment and then to move on. We wipe our eyes, dust our shoulders off, and continue with the day. Real talk, the pain will come up again, and you will move forward.
Sometimes there is unfinished business and this could impeach grieving. To have an “infection free” healing it’s important to “clean” you wound with all the memories of the relationship. The good and bad and imperfect memories will help clean the wound of grief of unfinished business,