The Grieving Process

Grief has no time limit. I’ve heard that a lot. I’ve also read there are stages to grief. Some professionals say there are 5 stages, some say 7 stages. I’m not trying to tell you some doctor has all of the answers. Personally I think it’s all garbage because every person is different. Every person deals with grief in their own way and no way is right or wrong. My personal opinion however is that grief never leaves. So I wanted to talk about the struggle of reconnecting after grief.

I chose to limit my world. I disconnected from just about everyone and everything. My psyche had to. My journey is much different than most but still I walk the path with everyone else suffering with loss in one way or another. Grief is grief.

As you know, this blog isn’t about me reconnecting to anything really. It’s about putting my own personal journeys out there because well, I was asked to. Maybe not by you in particular but the one reoccurring statement I kept hearing was “I would love to do what you’re doing. You should write about it.” And so I realized I was doing something I had always wanted to do but life gets in the way of the best intentions and dreams. When all of those things I valued in life were shattered into a million pieces, I simply started doing what made me feel ok in that moment.

Reconnecting to Possibilities

When Eric and I first visited Sanibel Island, Florida all those years ago (about 22 years ago I think), the internet wasn’t what it is today. Review sites didn’t exist. There were still hard copy guest books in the condos. I remember reading an entry from someone who had stayed in our condo for 4 weeks prior and I thought to myself, “where would one be in life to be able to just go and stay a month on the beach?” What would that take to be possible, as working remotely also wasn’t a thing back then. I had a child, 2 jobs, a husband, a house, numerous animals and lots of other obligations in my young adult life. That thought has always stuck with me until I had none of those things any more. Ok, well maybe the animals. They keep multiplying no matter what I do.

Reconnecting After Grief

My decision to travel also came with a price. Reconnection. Reconnection to the world and to people I wasn’t sure I was ready for. I found reconnecting to anything in my prior life extremely difficult and uncomfortable. That’s why my very first trip to Sanibel Island was Traveled Alone. I knew the place. I loved it. It was solitude. A place to recharge and make some important discoveries and decisions about the direction I wanted to go next. None of those things actually happened of course. I spent most of the time crying, and drinking, and crying some more. And then drinking some more. What did happen though was I met two women. They were both widows. They didn’t know each other, I met them each at separate times.

One was a sales associate in a toy store. After her loss, she packed up and moved across Florida. She started a life where no one knew her. She keeps in contact with her children and grandchildren but that’s it. The other was a real estate agent. She too sold or donated everything she owned, packed up and moved to a different city to start over.

I would have never met either of them if I hadn’t shared my story first. Even though their events were distant memories of a life long gone I could still see their buried, very familiar pain. This made me wonder, am I really going to ever get “better” or does time simply change the physical circumstances? I still don’t have an answer to that question. But each of them figured out what was needed to reconnect to something. That gave me a shred of hope.

What Reconnecting Looks Like Now

When we have nothing anything is possible. I try to remind myself of this frequently. Don’t even get me started on the “stuff” aspect. Decluttering and my views on “things” in general have shifted 180* since moving in 2019. I think that might be another post eventually.

My point is this, reconnecting is hard but sometimes necessary. After loss, it’s even more difficult and deeply personal. I’m taking one connection at a time. There was a time when I couldn’t. At all. Not today. Then tomorrow came and maybe it was just one person. Now I’ve become good at navigating multiple people on a daily basis but I don’t make apologies when I can’t. Oh, and internally nothing has really changed from day 10, to day 100, to day 450 in my grief journey. I’m not some rock star and I haven’t gotten anything figured out. I may look like I have a lot of fun on my adventures and I do. I also still do a lot of crying and that’s ok.

I’m not the same person I was before June two years ago. I don’t have the same relationships I did then. Some are better, some not so much. Some not at all. That’s ok too. With reconnecting comes discovery and acceptance. If you too are on a journey where you’re finding it hard to connect, know your people are out there. You just may not have connected yet. What’s been your struggle?

Thanks for reading. xxooC