Are there any good words for a friend who has lost a loved one?

A year and a month after my wife died unexpectedly, I am considering no longer using the words grief, missing, loss, hard, difficult, painful and so on, if I can help it. I will, of course, if a person recently deprived of a loved one uses them.

I didn’t feel helped by folk caring for and about me using these words. I did by their presence and their being there for me. I really appreciate the help I have had. It’s been awesome. With the words above, I wanted to say no. It’s not like that. I didn’t and don’t want to follow any recipe or map. Maybe long hugs is the way to go, crying laughing and remembering.

What is grief? If it’s taken to be an unspecified inner disturbance following the death of a loved one, I am good with that. This leaves room for just about anything. The words I am rejecting may be fine for others. So I guess we need to check things out. Ask how is it for you? Tricky maybe! But better than assuming. What do you think?

Here come some definitions:- Hard, (solid, firm, and rigid; not easily broken) (done with a great deal of force or strength) (requiring a great deal of endurance or effort). Difficult, (needing much effort or skill to accomplish).Pain:- (highly unpleasant physical sensation caused by illness or injury) (mental suffering or distress: the pain of loss).

I have not found it hard or difficult or painful. There have been times when it has not been easy but hard or difficult or painful, no, not really. Much of the time I have been reluctant to socialise. I don’t yet feel the energy I had before. There are days when I feel flat as a pancake. There are some days I get scared I’ll get stuck in flatness. But none of these are painful, difficult or hard.

When what is happening is allowed, it is easy. Most of us, maybe nearly all of us, have problems with allowing. This is what I think leads to labels like hard, painful, difficult etc.

Letting tears and sobbing flow requires no effort when there is no resistance. When the sobbing moves up and out, things end up cleaner and clearer. This is not hard or painful. When a lack of energy and motivation flood in, allowing these can be easy too, not difficult. Two to three days later energy begins to seep back in. A bit of rage flowed through me once. Its gone, well so far.

When the tears are felt and allowed and not resisted, it may not be joyful but it isn’t hard, painful or difficult. When what is arising is resisted things become bothersome and unpleasant but not hard, painful or difficult. When one wants it all to be over now, things get bothersome again. Being with what arises, for as long as it takes, is the way I want to go.

For me, there is a level of sobbing which I have not fully allowed as yet. I get to a certain point and clamp down on it. I don’t seem to be able to allow this on my own. I am scared of it. I am going to get help. This isn’t hard, painful or difficult. It’s disappointing. It ends with me bashing myself up a bit.

Both missing and loss contain a potential for being found. I’ve lost my keys. I go looking for them. I am not looking for Tish. A missing person, may be alive or dead and may yet be found, may come back home. Tish has gone. She isn’t missing.

Missing did feel appropriate for a while. With an imagined possibility of Tish’s return, a lingering false hope, missing sort of made sense. There was and maybe is a residual hanging onto what cannot be. It too will pass.

There is something more to this loss and missing business which points to me rather than Tish not being here. I am only dimly aware of it.

Tish, besides her personal issues, was often filled with an appreciation of beauty, poetry and nature. She was a welcoming and joyous woman. Gratitude was close by for her and often felt. She loved intensely and with ease. Her immediate response was yes. She was a source of these things for me. I so enjoyed watching her and being with her. And yes she could be an almighty pain in the arse sometimes.

I guess what I delighted in, in Tish went missing in me, many years ago, to one degree or another. I am thinking I’d better become a source myself rather than find another ‘she’ to replace Tish. I am struggling a bit here. I have a vague sense of this. We shall see.

With Tish gone so has my connection to her, my various charka connections with her, the neurotic attachments and true ones, the life we had together with all its habits and rituals and everything I relied on her for (it’s a growing list). There will be over time a letting go of all of these and lots of adjustments.

Three years my mum took to not reflexively point things out to my dad who wasn’t there.

What do you think. I am in the middle of it. Things will change. Maybe I’ll pop out of my robotised armour. Hee Hee!