Most people, the ones who try to give us their love and support in our bereavement often times feel helpless and don't quite know what to say. In the attempt of well
meaning when they do try to speak to our pain there are those times when those who are bereaved will be confronted with statements that leave varying degrees of hurt, anger
or frustration. The bereaved person knows with such statements that people in trying to help really can't comprehend just what the loss really means for us. Only we can know the impact of the loss as we walk along the uncharted path we now face. People around us can't possibly know the depth of our relationship with the loved one, the complexities, the memories or the whole gambit of emotions that arise with the loss of a loved one.
In their love for us they wish for us to be ourselves again without the intense pain we feel. Unfortunately we have become a world of quick fixes. With grief there is no
quick fix, in fact it is something that one quite simply has to go through before being able to reach the other side of healing. There is no getting around it, there are no detours. To avoid it will only result in more harm down the road when it resurfaces when least expected and leaves one quite bewildered. Bottling it up, keeping the stiff upper lip, trying to be strong for everyone else, hurts us more in the long run.
Certainly one of the initial emotions that will arise following the loss of a loved one is shock, the death may have been a sudden one or the result of a long term of illness. Even though I knew my mother's transition was near long before it actually happened, none the less it was still a shock when it happened.
Having seen her fight back thru so many illnesses over the course of the last 15 years I think anyone who knew her thought in the back of their mind that she would bounce back this time. In the back of my own mind I never thought I would see the day that she wouldn't be able to fight anymore. And she did come back to a degree after the 2nd stroke, the nurses had said she was as tough as nails, someone responded she was made of nails just as strong. Granted this just took too much out of her, she was tired and she deserved peace and rest.
In the days following her transition, weeks that grew to almost 2 months, I was pretty much numb, I had been on automatic pilot for months leading up to her death. Having felt so helpless to change the one thing that was destroying my mother I was at a loss as to what do to. There were moments when the phone would ring and I would wonder if that time had come. And time was the only thing that was going to get me to a point where I could allow myself to feel all the feelings that were stored inside of me.
And helplessness was not the only feeling that carried over from a slow death vigil that became entrenched in the mourning process. Another feeling that I had struggled with early on, when the deterioration of her health became more readily noticable, was the guilt that I could not be there for my mother in the way that I would have wished. It became clear that I was not physically capable, properly trained, nor had the emotional capacity to be my mother's primary caretaker. The toll would have been irreversible, two equally strong, tenancious women under the same roof would have done more harm than good.I asked her on a couple of occasions if she wanted me to move home, she always
replied, "No."
I wasn't the only one feeling so lost, frustrated from the insensitive remarks of "Get over it, get on with your life."
One of the other things I came to notice in the days and weeks following her transition was a quality of almost disbelief that she was really gone. Even though I had witnessed my mother making her transiton there was an
