New Day

Monday August 28th, 2017

Today is an exciting day for me.  I hit the proverbial button to start the beginning of my book being published, Embracing Life From Death.  It marks a new chapter in my personal growth and I am officially becoming a writer.  It is the one good thing that has sprung from all the grief in my life in the past year and a half.  To say that grief has changed who I am is an understatement.  It has brought emotions from deep inside of me that I did not know existed and connected me to my soul.  It is bringing me back to where I began.  I wonder if in the big scheme of my life experience, Dean sacrificed his golden years to give me the gift of knowing there is life after death so that I could appreciate life in a new way.  To help me grow spiritually further than I ever would have as opposed to if we had lived together to a ripe old age.

While I try to be grateful for these new challenges, it does not stop the grief.  A funny thing happened the other night.  I woke up from a dead sleep crying.  I was gasping for breathe, and startled that I felt such sadness upon the transition from sleep to consciousness.   The overwhelming pain of losing Dean, my dad, my daughter being sick  with cancer and my mother recently being diagnosed with early stage Alzheimer stirred my subconscious sorrow.   I sat up and sobbed...the snotty, ugly can't breathe kind of crying.  I begged God and/or my guardians or angels to help me as I felt like I could not take anymore grief or pain (I experience grief as a physical pain in my mind and my body).  I felt like I was getting kicked in the throat one hit after another and life was telling me to "STAY DOWN!"

I finally fell asleep but when I awoke, I picked up my cell phone off the charger and there was a random email from a company that I had received some life insurance from.  I normally would swipe right and delete it but something made me click on it.  In that marketing email was a link to a story called The One Thing No One Ever Says About Grieving.  It called me to click on it and led me to a blog by Katherine Schafler, a NYC Psycotherapist who writes her own blog.

She talked about how we get in these loops of grief.  That we hold onto the pain sometimes as a comfort and that there are four steps to begin to move through this challenge.  She comments about grief not being linear in time, and that really helped me feel like I was not the only one to struggle with the ups and downs of my emotional state.  Just when I thought I was feeling strong, ready to live life again, the sorrow would hit me and knock me to my knees and I would feel like I was back at the beginning.

Kathleen's Wisdom:
1.  Understand and acknowledge your heart is broken - Other's can't see it but it doesn't mean it doesn't still hurt
2.  Recognize that you need to grieve-Why does it hurt so much-(mine is insecurity)
3.  Touch - You have to touch the pain - Fully feel every emotion  - (this part I still need to fully understand)
4.  Move - Go past the grief into new feelings and emotions (I'm still working on this as well)

I immediately resonated with this logic and just like that...I felt better.
Thank you Angels from above!