Good Grief...

I am learning again the lessons of grief and what it feels like.... It is over two weeks since my friend died but still I feel it. I have known these feelings and read about them before but it does not stop you sensing them all over again. Here are some a grieving person feels.

Loneliness....
I was talking to a firefighter today telling him that I went to Australia to a friends funeral. "Gee.. that's a long way to go for a funeral!" he said. It does not matter how understanding people try to be, only the grieving person knows the relationship they had with the loved one. It is impossible to describe what a person means to you, in fact you don't know yourself until they are not there. So you feel incredibly lonely in your grief. It is, in one sense, something only you can endure, because others did not have that same link. Because of this you feel alone.

Darkness...
Life seems to be a waste of time. You come back and work but where as once you worked with a sense of hope, you have this sense that, "What's the use?" Life was once beautiful, now it seems black. Once it had meaning now you feel like saying, "Why care, we all end up dead anyway?" Life seems so short, it seems to have come and gone for you and your lost one, in a flash. "We are nothing but grass." suggests a biblical passage, "here one day and gone the next".

Emotionally exhausted...
I was visiting firestations today talking with people. Everything was OK but I just felt like I had had enough. I left a firestation and began to drive to the next... I thought "No.... I just can't be bothered relating to one more group of people!" I am at the moment trying to get together enough emotional strength to face a night at the drop-in centre. Somehow you are just tired... and wake up tired... not wanting to meet people. Trying to get creative in preparing a worship service, I feel like I am dragging the chain. I would love to have the time to go bush.

These are just three of the feelings I am experiencing. I guess I will "build a bridge" but apart from anything else its is a refresher course for me on the experience of "grief". I have these feelings when Ian was "just a friend" who actually lived a long way away from me. I was not related to him, married to him or in regular contact. I cannot imagine how his widow Curly is feeling.

People about me don't have time to talk, life goes on as normal for them. I remember feeling this long ago when my dad died. I wanted to yell "Stop the world!" ... but the reality is "Life goes on"... and in time I will adapt. I may not get the time to talk, but I can blog out into the mysterious cyberspace. That's better than nothing.

A couple of thoughts on "Friendship" from my mum's beside booklet.

The light of friendship
is like the light of phosphorus -
seen plainest when all around is dark. (Crowell)

I guess that means when life is dark you find out who your true friends are.

We are all travelers in the wilderness of this world,
and the best that we find in our travels
is an honest friend. (Robert Louis Stevenson)

Photo: Heading toward Green Peak in the Silver Peaks area. Where I would love to be right now.