June is the griefiest month - What's Your Grief

[KayC]

Okay, maybe not for y0u, but it is for me. You probably have your own griefiest month(s). Because grief is like that. And seasons are like that. Years and decades can pass and yet our bodies somehow still 'know'. The grief, that grief that always remains a part of us but sometimes lies well below the surface, can suddenly start bubbling. The sights and sounds of a new season, the days passing on the calendar, they can cycle the grief through us. For me, no matter how long it has been, no matter how many other losses I've lived through, June is still the month when I feel my grief

Quick sidenote reassurance, for whoever needs it: hard grief days, even years later, aren't a sign that you're failing at grief. It isn't some big red flag that you're grief isn't "recovered" (because grief isn't some meant to be "recovered" from). It's a sign that you're human and that you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do - loving someone, missing someone, allowing yourself to feel your feelings when they come up.

And OF COURSE they'll come up. I love the words of Katja Faber Argena, whose son Alex was tragically murdered. Of her grief she says, "it is as vast, catastrophic, and life-changing as it was the first day I had to continue living without my child. Yet, somehow, I’ve learned to live with the loss and to grow from it. What’s helped is a newly grown, invisible-to-others grief muscle. It’s this that has made the difference between lying in bed incapacitated and living again -- it’s what helps me carry my grief".

But just like at the gym, our muscles cooperate some days more than others. Sometimes the are weary from the weight they've been carrying. Some days, some months, the world around us heaps new weight onto us, and that grief muscle shakes and buckles. This is no failure. This is reality. This is also how the muscle continues to grow.

Okay, back to June. My griefiest month.

Father's Day and my dad's deathiversary happen a week apart, each and every June. So it only seems appropriate that I be the one to write the Father's Day edition of the WYG newsletter. But don't worry, even if you aren't a father who has had a child die or a child who has lost a father die, no need to close your email just yet. We're talking about all sorts of things this week . . . Father's Day. Deathiversaries. The abiding universality of human suffering. Ya know, the usual.

---

This week last year I was at my college reunion. revisiting the place where I lived at 18 when my dad died, the place where I spent the next 3 years of my life & grief. From the trip came a wave of memories that I hadn't thought of in some time, but have thought of many times in the months since.

The summer of my first year of college I committed to working for one of my professors that coming summer, helping with an International Summer Program on the Holocaust. It would be on my campus, with students and professors coming from the US, Germany, Poland, and Israel. I had no idea that by summer everything in my life would have changed so completely.

The program started just weeks after my dad’s unexpected-expected death (we need a word for that, don't we?). Though I imagine someone tried to talk me out of it (I don’t remember) I drove myself the two hours back to campus, moved into a closet I'd subleased in a house full of strangers, and started my summer job. What else was I going to do with myself?

On my 2nd day, after learning about my dad’s death on day one (surprise! Your 18-year-old summer employee is here, ready to work in the throes of acute grief!), my professor gave me a book - The Father by Sharon Olds. It is a book Olds wrote about the illness and death of her father, a man with whom she had a complicated relationship (to put it mildly). She captures the complexity of life, death, and grief again and again, poem after poem. Love and hate, disbelief and poignancy, devastation and absurdity, and all the rest. It was my first real window into what it meant to give grief words.

The program got underway and I was surrounded by students who had traveled around the world to study in this Holocaust program, many because of deep connection to the Holocaust and their own intergenerational trauma. The older I get and the more time I spend with grief, the more I've come to understand how significant that short summer job was to my own grief and to my own life from there.

I always come back to one particular day. After dropping a van full of students off for a seminar at the Holocaust Museum in DC, I parked and decided to use my waiting time to walk through the museum. It wasn't my first visit - at 14 I had been deeply affected by a school field trip.

But walking through the museum in the wake of my father's death, it was like I was experiencing everything for the first time. I felt in places I hadn't known existed in myself at 14, before I'd known real loss. Maybe they hadn't existed back then. Perhaps they were places that had been carved into me by personal sorrow.

I remember walking into the room with the shoes, standing silently in front of them, weeping. If you have been to the Holocaust Museum, you know these shoes. The shoes are from the Majdanek camp. As the exhibit explains, it was the first major concentration camp to be encountered and liberated by Soviet forces. The shoes were among the first haunting evidence of Nazi crimes and lives lost.

I can remember, even now, feeling overwhelmed by how immense my personal grief felt and simultaneously dazed by how tiny and insignificant it felt. The weight of my dad's death somehow amplified the incomprehensible enormity of the deaths of 6 million Jews and the 60 million+ lives lost in World War 2. Self-absorbed as it sounds, my own grief became this lens that somehow brought these fathers, mothers, and children so clearly into focus.

You may be wondering if going off for this job just weeks after my dad’s death was a good idea. In theory, no. But in practice it was one of the best bad decisions I’ve made. At 18, an age when you’re still so much the center of your own universe, I was thrust out of it and into the shadow of things so much larger than myself. The part of me that had wanted to scream “why me?” for weeks was faced with an answer from the universe: "why not you?".

Unexpectedly, that answer became a buoy. In the losses I have gone through since it has remained one of my lifelines. For each of us, our personal grief is simultaneously the greatest of tragedies - an entire universe of despair - and a single drop in the ocean of human anguish. Even now, as a fully formed adult, it feels hard to reconcile and yet strangely comforting.

For many years, I assumed it was odd to find comfort in this paradox. Then in 2014 I attended the national Compassionate Friends conference, the peer support program for every family experiencing the death of a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a grandchild. I attended the session of a bereaved mother speaking about the death of her three-year-old daughter. She described an unfathomable aftermath of court proceedings, the dissolution of her marriage, her feelings of isolation, and crisis of purpose.

She then shared a moment when things pivoted in her own grief. While reading something completely unrelated to grief or her loss, she stumbled on a statistic: "the child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday". This lead her to start researching infant and child mortality, stunned as she tried to absorb the reality that until her great-grandmothers generation and for all of human history before that, you were significantly more likely to be a bereaved parent than not.

With hesitation, she described the comfort she found in this realization. She crunched numbers, considering what it must have felt like for women to take such an unimaginable gamble with each pregnancy. I could see in her face the worry that no one in this seminar of other bereaved parents would understand her. She shared that staring at these numbers recontextualized everything for her, connecting her loss to the broader history of loss, finding solace in knowing she was simply a grain of sand on the beach of human suffering. I can't say if others understood her, but I know that I did.

Viewing our personal losses within the history of human suffering does not make our personal grief any less painful. But it does change the stories we tell ourselves about our losses. In the years since that conference, I have realized just how many people have tapped into the odd consolation found in the universality of human suffering. Perhaps most popularly, bereaved mom and resiliency expert Lucy Hone in her viral TEDtalk 'Three Secrets of Resilient People" (now viewed on YouTube more than 38 million times).

She describes something from the research that she experienced in her grief following her 12 year old daughter's death, "resilient people get that **** happens. They know that suffering is part of life. This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in, they're not actually delusional. Just that when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. And knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when the tough times come. Never once did I find myself thinking, "Why me?" In fact, I remember thinking, "Why not me? Terrible things happen to you, just like they do everybody else. That's your life now, time to sink or swim." The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer".

June is my griefiest month. That means absolutely everything and also nothing at all.

[shawnt]

I have to think about this.

I did want to say you are a beautiful writer.

[KayC]

I didn't write it, it's from WHAT'S YOUR GRIEF!  If I'd have written I would mentioned how Father's Day, June 19th is the day my husband died and I've spent all of them alone since.

 

[shawnt]

I have to think about this.

I did want to say you are a beautiful writer.

I think the idea of resilience is a good one but you have to have faith that you can make it thru to the other side.

My wife was the driving force behind most family days . I only took the lead for Mother's day and her birthday, I did remember to get my dad a card and I will of course call him.

I think certain days and memorial type days can be very hard and can taint them forever , it is unfortunate that you have such a load in June.

I seem to be having trouble organizing my thoughts today and maybe should declare a do nothing, think nothing day of rest. Sorry for the ramble.

[Nancy2]

11 hours ago, KayC said:

Okay, maybe not for y0u, but it is for me. You probably have your own griefiest month(s). Because grief is like that. And seasons are like that. Years and decades can pass and yet our bodies somehow still 'know'. The grief, that grief that always remains a part of us but sometimes lies well below the surface, can suddenly start bubbling. The sights and sounds of a new season, the days passing on the calendar, they can cycle the grief through us. For me, no matter how long it has been, no matter how many other losses I've lived through, June is still the month when I feel my grief

Quick sidenote reassurance, for whoever needs it: hard grief days, even years later, aren't a sign that you're failing at grief. It isn't some big red flag that you're grief isn't "recovered" (because grief isn't some meant to be "recovered" from). It's a sign that you're human and that you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do - loving someone, missing someone, allowing yourself to feel your feelings when they come up.

And OF COURSE they'll come up. I love the words of Katja Faber Argena, whose son Alex was tragically murdered. Of her grief she says, "it is as vast, catastrophic, and life-changing as it was the first day I had to continue living without my child. Yet, somehow, I’ve learned to live with the loss and to grow from it. What’s helped is a newly grown, invisible-to-others grief muscle. It’s this that has made the difference between lying in bed incapacitated and living again -- it’s what helps me carry my grief".

But just like at the gym, our muscles cooperate some days more than others. Sometimes the are weary from the weight they've been carrying. Some days, some months, the world around us heaps new weight onto us, and that grief muscle shakes and buckles. This is no failure. This is reality. This is also how the muscle continues to grow.

Okay, back to June. My griefiest month.

Father's Day and my dad's deathiversary happen a week apart, each and every June. So it only seems appropriate that I be the one to write the Father's Day edition of the WYG newsletter. But don't worry, even if you aren't a father who has had a child die or a child who has lost a father die, no need to close your email just yet. We're talking about all sorts of things this week . . . Father's Day. Deathiversaries. The abiding universality of human suffering. Ya know, the usual.

---

This week last year I was at my college reunion. revisiting the place where I lived at 18 when my dad died, the place where I spent the next 3 years of my life & grief. From the trip came a wave of memories that I hadn't thought of in some time, but have thought of many times in the months since.

The summer of my first year of college I committed to working for one of my professors that coming summer, helping with an International Summer Program on the Holocaust. It would be on my campus, with students and professors coming from the US, Germany, Poland, and Israel. I had no idea that by summer everything in my life would have changed so completely.

The program started just weeks after my dad’s unexpected-expected death (we need a word for that, don't we?). Though I imagine someone tried to talk me out of it (I don’t remember) I drove myself the two hours back to campus, moved into a closet I'd subleased in a house full of strangers, and started my summer job. What else was I going to do with myself?

On my 2nd day, after learning about my dad’s death on day one (surprise! Your 18-year-old summer employee is here, ready to work in the throes of acute grief!), my professor gave me a book - The Father by Sharon Olds. It is a book Olds wrote about the illness and death of her father, a man with whom she had a complicated relationship (to put it mildly). She captures the complexity of life, death, and grief again and again, poem after poem. Love and hate, disbelief and poignancy, devastation and absurdity, and all the rest. It was my first real window into what it meant to give grief words.

The program got underway and I was surrounded by students who had traveled around the world to study in this Holocaust program, many because of deep connection to the Holocaust and their own intergenerational trauma. The older I get and the more time I spend with grief, the more I've come to understand how significant that short summer job was to my own grief and to my own life from there.

I always come back to one particular day. After dropping a van full of students off for a seminar at the Holocaust Museum in DC, I parked and decided to use my waiting time to walk through the museum. It wasn't my first visit - at 14 I had been deeply affected by a school field trip.

But walking through the museum in the wake of my father's death, it was like I was experiencing everything for the first time. I felt in places I hadn't known existed in myself at 14, before I'd known real loss. Maybe they hadn't existed back then. Perhaps they were places that had been carved into me by personal sorrow.

I remember walking into the room with the shoes, standing silently in front of them, weeping. If you have been to the Holocaust Museum, you know these shoes. The shoes are from the Majdanek camp. As the exhibit explains, it was the first major concentration camp to be encountered and liberated by Soviet forces. The shoes were among the first haunting evidence of Nazi crimes and lives lost.

I can remember, even now, feeling overwhelmed by how immense my personal grief felt and simultaneously dazed by how tiny and insignificant it felt. The weight of my dad's death somehow amplified the incomprehensible enormity of the deaths of 6 million Jews and the 60 million+ lives lost in World War 2. Self-absorbed as it sounds, my own grief became this lens that somehow brought these fathers, mothers, and children so clearly into focus.

You may be wondering if going off for this job just weeks after my dad’s death was a good idea. In theory, no. But in practice it was one of the best bad decisions I’ve made. At 18, an age when you’re still so much the center of your own universe, I was thrust out of it and into the shadow of things so much larger than myself. The part of me that had wanted to scream “why me?” for weeks was faced with an answer from the universe: "why not you?".

Unexpectedly, that answer became a buoy. In the losses I have gone through since it has remained one of my lifelines. For each of us, our personal grief is simultaneously the greatest of tragedies - an entire universe of despair - and a single drop in the ocean of human anguish. Even now, as a fully formed adult, it feels hard to reconcile and yet strangely comforting.

For many years, I assumed it was odd to find comfort in this paradox. Then in 2014 I attended the national Compassionate Friends conference, the peer support program for every family experiencing the death of a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a grandchild. I attended the session of a bereaved mother speaking about the death of her three-year-old daughter. She described an unfathomable aftermath of court proceedings, the dissolution of her marriage, her feelings of isolation, and crisis of purpose.

She then shared a moment when things pivoted in her own grief. While reading something completely unrelated to grief or her loss, she stumbled on a statistic: "the child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday". This lead her to start researching infant and child mortality, stunned as she tried to absorb the reality that until her great-grandmothers generation and for all of human history before that, you were significantly more likely to be a bereaved parent than not.

With hesitation, she described the comfort she found in this realization. She crunched numbers, considering what it must have felt like for women to take such an unimaginable gamble with each pregnancy. I could see in her face the worry that no one in this seminar of other bereaved parents would understand her. She shared that staring at these numbers recontextualized everything for her, connecting her loss to the broader history of loss, finding solace in knowing she was simply a grain of sand on the beach of human suffering. I can't say if others understood her, but I know that I did.

Viewing our personal losses within the history of human suffering does not make our personal grief any less painful. But it does change the stories we tell ourselves about our losses. In the years since that conference, I have realized just how many people have tapped into the odd consolation found in the universality of human suffering. Perhaps most popularly, bereaved mom and resiliency expert Lucy Hone in her viral TEDtalk 'Three Secrets of Resilient People" (now viewed on YouTube more than 38 million times).

She describes something from the research that she experienced in her grief following her 12 year old daughter's death, "resilient people get that **** happens. They know that suffering is part of life. This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in, they're not actually delusional. Just that when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. And knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when the tough times come. Never once did I find myself thinking, "Why me?" In fact, I remember thinking, "Why not me? Terrible things happen to you, just like they do everybody else. That's your life now, time to sink or swim." The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer".

June is my griefiest month. That means absolutely everything and also nothing at all.

Yes, I agree and understand all of this.  Yes, human suffering is universal and all-encompassing on a grand scale through so many unimaginable tragedies like the Holocaust.  Furthermore, in a historical context and even now in many parts of undeveloped countries, life is brutish and short.  But here's the rub for me.  There are so many people that  I know on a personal level whose parents or spouses or other relatives are thriving in their late nineties, still alive, still healthy, still doing just great as are all of their healthy children.  That's what bothers me.  There are a vast amount of people out there who experience very little suffering throughout their lives, and it is that injustice that I have always had a hard time accepting, but there it is, and that is the way it is.  However, ultimately, the ending is the same for us all.

11 hours ago, KayC said:

Okay, maybe not for y0u, but it is for me. You probably have your own griefiest month(s). Because grief is like that. And seasons are like that. Years and decades can pass and yet our bodies somehow still 'know'. The grief, that grief that always remains a part of us but sometimes lies well below the surface, can suddenly start bubbling. The sights and sounds of a new season, the days passing on the calendar, they can cycle the grief through us. For me, no matter how long it has been, no matter how many other losses I've lived through, June is still the month when I feel my grief

Quick sidenote reassurance, for whoever needs it: hard grief days, even years later, aren't a sign that you're failing at grief. It isn't some big red flag that you're grief isn't "recovered" (because grief isn't some meant to be "recovered" from). It's a sign that you're human and that you're doing exactly what you're supposed to do - loving someone, missing someone, allowing yourself to feel your feelings when they come up.

And OF COURSE they'll come up. I love the words of Katja Faber Argena, whose son Alex was tragically murdered. Of her grief she says, "it is as vast, catastrophic, and life-changing as it was the first day I had to continue living without my child. Yet, somehow, I’ve learned to live with the loss and to grow from it. What’s helped is a newly grown, invisible-to-others grief muscle. It’s this that has made the difference between lying in bed incapacitated and living again -- it’s what helps me carry my grief".

But just like at the gym, our muscles cooperate some days more than others. Sometimes the are weary from the weight they've been carrying. Some days, some months, the world around us heaps new weight onto us, and that grief muscle shakes and buckles. This is no failure. This is reality. This is also how the muscle continues to grow.

Okay, back to June. My griefiest month.

Father's Day and my dad's deathiversary happen a week apart, each and every June. So it only seems appropriate that I be the one to write the Father's Day edition of the WYG newsletter. But don't worry, even if you aren't a father who has had a child die or a child who has lost a father die, no need to close your email just yet. We're talking about all sorts of things this week . . . Father's Day. Deathiversaries. The abiding universality of human suffering. Ya know, the usual.

---

This week last year I was at my college reunion. revisiting the place where I lived at 18 when my dad died, the place where I spent the next 3 years of my life & grief. From the trip came a wave of memories that I hadn't thought of in some time, but have thought of many times in the months since.

The summer of my first year of college I committed to working for one of my professors that coming summer, helping with an International Summer Program on the Holocaust. It would be on my campus, with students and professors coming from the US, Germany, Poland, and Israel. I had no idea that by summer everything in my life would have changed so completely.

The program started just weeks after my dad’s unexpected-expected death (we need a word for that, don't we?). Though I imagine someone tried to talk me out of it (I don’t remember) I drove myself the two hours back to campus, moved into a closet I'd subleased in a house full of strangers, and started my summer job. What else was I going to do with myself?

On my 2nd day, after learning about my dad’s death on day one (surprise! Your 18-year-old summer employee is here, ready to work in the throes of acute grief!), my professor gave me a book - The Father by Sharon Olds. It is a book Olds wrote about the illness and death of her father, a man with whom she had a complicated relationship (to put it mildly). She captures the complexity of life, death, and grief again and again, poem after poem. Love and hate, disbelief and poignancy, devastation and absurdity, and all the rest. It was my first real window into what it meant to give grief words.

The program got underway and I was surrounded by students who had traveled around the world to study in this Holocaust program, many because of deep connection to the Holocaust and their own intergenerational trauma. The older I get and the more time I spend with grief, the more I've come to understand how significant that short summer job was to my own grief and to my own life from there.

I always come back to one particular day. After dropping a van full of students off for a seminar at the Holocaust Museum in DC, I parked and decided to use my waiting time to walk through the museum. It wasn't my first visit - at 14 I had been deeply affected by a school field trip.

But walking through the museum in the wake of my father's death, it was like I was experiencing everything for the first time. I felt in places I hadn't known existed in myself at 14, before I'd known real loss. Maybe they hadn't existed back then. Perhaps they were places that had been carved into me by personal sorrow.

I remember walking into the room with the shoes, standing silently in front of them, weeping. If you have been to the Holocaust Museum, you know these shoes. The shoes are from the Majdanek camp. As the exhibit explains, it was the first major concentration camp to be encountered and liberated by Soviet forces. The shoes were among the first haunting evidence of Nazi crimes and lives lost.

I can remember, even now, feeling overwhelmed by how immense my personal grief felt and simultaneously dazed by how tiny and insignificant it felt. The weight of my dad's death somehow amplified the incomprehensible enormity of the deaths of 6 million Jews and the 60 million+ lives lost in World War 2. Self-absorbed as it sounds, my own grief became this lens that somehow brought these fathers, mothers, and children so clearly into focus.

You may be wondering if going off for this job just weeks after my dad’s death was a good idea. In theory, no. But in practice it was one of the best bad decisions I’ve made. At 18, an age when you’re still so much the center of your own universe, I was thrust out of it and into the shadow of things so much larger than myself. The part of me that had wanted to scream “why me?” for weeks was faced with an answer from the universe: "why not you?".

Unexpectedly, that answer became a buoy. In the losses I have gone through since it has remained one of my lifelines. For each of us, our personal grief is simultaneously the greatest of tragedies - an entire universe of despair - and a single drop in the ocean of human anguish. Even now, as a fully formed adult, it feels hard to reconcile and yet strangely comforting.

For many years, I assumed it was odd to find comfort in this paradox. Then in 2014 I attended the national Compassionate Friends conference, the peer support program for every family experiencing the death of a son or a daughter, a brother or a sister, or a grandchild. I attended the session of a bereaved mother speaking about the death of her three-year-old daughter. She described an unfathomable aftermath of court proceedings, the dissolution of her marriage, her feelings of isolation, and crisis of purpose.

She then shared a moment when things pivoted in her own grief. While reading something completely unrelated to grief or her loss, she stumbled on a statistic: "the child mortality rate in the United States, for children under the age of five, was 462.9 deaths per thousand births in 1800. This means that for every thousand babies born in 1800, over 46 percent did not make it to their fifth birthday". This lead her to start researching infant and child mortality, stunned as she tried to absorb the reality that until her great-grandmothers generation and for all of human history before that, you were significantly more likely to be a bereaved parent than not.

With hesitation, she described the comfort she found in this realization. She crunched numbers, considering what it must have felt like for women to take such an unimaginable gamble with each pregnancy. I could see in her face the worry that no one in this seminar of other bereaved parents would understand her. She shared that staring at these numbers recontextualized everything for her, connecting her loss to the broader history of loss, finding solace in knowing she was simply a grain of sand on the beach of human suffering. I can't say if others understood her, but I know that I did.

Viewing our personal losses within the history of human suffering does not make our personal grief any less painful. But it does change the stories we tell ourselves about our losses. In the years since that conference, I have realized just how many people have tapped into the odd consolation found in the universality of human suffering. Perhaps most popularly, bereaved mom and resiliency expert Lucy Hone in her viral TEDtalk 'Three Secrets of Resilient People" (now viewed on YouTube more than 38 million times).

She describes something from the research that she experienced in her grief following her 12 year old daughter's death, "resilient people get that **** happens. They know that suffering is part of life. This doesn't mean they actually welcome it in, they're not actually delusional. Just that when the tough times come, they seem to know that suffering is part of every human existence. And knowing this stops you from feeling discriminated against when the tough times come. Never once did I find myself thinking, "Why me?" In fact, I remember thinking, "Why not me? Terrible things happen to you, just like they do everybody else. That's your life now, time to sink or swim." The real tragedy is that not enough of us seem to know this any longer".

June is my griefiest month. That means absolutely everything and also nothing at all.

Yes, I agree and understand all of this.  Yes, human suffering is universal and all-encompassing on a grand scale through so many unimaginable tragedies like the Holocaust.  Furthermore, in a historical context and even now in many parts of undeveloped countries, life is brutish and short.  But here's the rub for me.  There are so many people that  I know on a personal level whose parents or spouses or other relatives are thriving in their late nineties, still alive, still healthy, still doing just great as are all of their healthy children.  That's what bothers me.  There are a vast amount of people out there who experience very little suffering throughout their lives, and it is that injustice that I have always had a hard time accepting, but there it is, and that is the way it is.  However, ultimately, the ending is the same for us all.

[widower2]

Great post Kay.

Aug and esp Oct are my "bad" months. Aug is the month of my beloved's as well as my sister's birthday...and ironically, Oct is the month they both passed (and also my birthday month ugh). And because our so-called "friends" disappeared on me, my birthdays are usually spent alone. If I could skip from Sept to Mar every year, I would!

[KayC]

10 hours ago, Nancy2 said:

There are a vast amount of people out there who experience very little suffering throughout their lives, and it is that injustice that I have always had a hard time accepting

Over the years I have noticed it is precisely in those hard times that I learn and grow so rather than resent my suffering and hardships, I have learned to be thankful for even them...without them I might be shallow, but I have learned more than I can put into words through the suffering in my life.  No part of this comes easy, and we have our ups and downs as we go through it, yet there's another part of me that is aware of this and can look at it in that way.

9 hours ago, widower2 said:

Great post Kay.

Aug and esp Oct are my "bad" months. Aug is the month of my beloved's as well as my sister's birthday...and ironically, Oct is the month they both passed (and also my birthday month ugh). And because our so-called "friends" disappeared on me, my birthdays are usually spent alone. If I could skip from Sept to Mar every year, I would!

I'm sorry you went through the same thing as I experienced, I would not have expected ALL of our friends to disappear pronto, but that's what they did!  I made a new one that was my BFF for ten years but she moved eight years ago to TX, I miss the relationship we have yet am happy for her, she remarried and is happy so would not wish it any other way.  No one else has come along, oh a couple here and there, but no one close, no one to do things with, very much alone and thankful for the pets I've had in my life since.  Me, I'd skip Dec.- Apr., that part of me that hates shoveling snow!  But now wildfire season is upon us. The news doesn't let us enjoy a break in between, always broadcasting hardship and instilling fear so I limit my contact with them, I've done what I can and continue taking a day at a time, will be evacuation ready come August-Oct.  Ugh.  June is my tough month emotionally.  And of course, always alone at Christmas.  Not even sure I can put up a Christmas tree physically anymore, I bought a six ft. one last year so I'm hoping. It was all I could do to drag it in the house, haven't even opened it yet.  We'll see.  People forget with us widows and widowers aging how hard it is to be ONE person instead of TWO doing things.

I'm sorry this season is so hard for you.

 

[Nancy2]

1 hour ago, KayC said:

Over the years I have noticed it is precisely in those hard times that I learn and grow so rather than resent my suffering and hardships, I have learned to be thankful for even them...without them I might be shallow, but I have learned more than I can put into words through the suffering in my life.  No part of this comes easy, and we have our ups and downs as we go through it, yet there's another part of me that is aware of this and can look at it in that way.

I'm sorry you went through the same thing as I experienced, I would not have expected ALL of our friends to disappear pronto, but that's what they did!  I made a new one that was my BFF for ten years but she moved eight years ago to TX, I miss the relationship we have yet am happy for her, she remarried and is happy so would not wish it any other way.  No one else has come along, oh a couple here and there, but no one close, no one to do things with, very much alone and thankful for the pets I've had in my life since.  Me, I'd skip Dec.- Apr., that part of me that hates shoveling snow!  But now wildfire season is upon us. The news doesn't let us enjoy a break in between, always broadcasting hardship and instilling fear so I limit my contact with them, I've done what I can and continue taking a day at a time, will be evacuation ready come August-Oct.  Ugh.  June is my tough month emotionally.  And of course, always alone at Christmas.  Not even sure I can put up a Christmas tree physically anymore, I bought a six ft. one last year so I'm hoping. It was all I could do to drag it in the house, haven't even opened it yet.  We'll see.  People forget with us widows and widowers aging how hard it is to be ONE person instead of TWO doing things.

I'm sorry this season is so hard for you.

 

Yes I can look at suffering that way to some degree.  Thanks for sharing that perspective with me.  I am probably less shallow too, and I have also learned and grown from it all.  

[Sar123]

This will be the first Father’s Day that my husband won’t be here to celebrate it. These “firsts” are hard and emotional. I miss him every single day. Our tradition became reserving a table at the race track and our kids would meet us there. So many good memories. Now my son is going to keep the tradition up and will be going to the track (in Mexico City) with his family. I dread every holiday and find no joy in them.
 

I’ve had friends text “Happy Easter” and then tell me how they were celebrating with their families. They meant well, but they made the day worse. They knew I had nowhere to go. They actually thought they were being helpful by wishing me Happy Easter, but all it did was sink me into a depression because this is my life now and I have to travel this new road by myself now. My niece invited me to her family’s celebration for her husband and her father. I declined and she understood how painful the day will be for me. There should be a helpful  handbook or list on what to say and not to say to widow/widowers. 

[shawnt]

There are 50 books, none of them work.

[Nancy2]

1 hour ago, Sar123 said:

This will be the first Father’s Day that my husband won’t be here to celebrate it. These “firsts” are hard and emotional. I miss him every single day. Our tradition became reserving a table at the race track and our kids would meet us there. So many good memories. Now my son is going to keep the tradition up and will be going to the track (in Mexico City) with his family. I dread every holiday and find no joy in them.
 

I’ve had friends text “Happy Easter” and then tell me how they were celebrating with their families. They meant well, but they made the day worse. They knew I had nowhere to go. They actually thought they were being helpful by wishing me Happy Easter, but all it did was sink me into a depression because this is my life now and I have to travel this new road by myself now. My niece invited me to her family’s celebration for her husband and her father. I declined and she understood how painful the day will be for me. There should be a helpful  handbook or list on what to say and not to say to widow/widowers. 

Me too.  I want to ignore the holidays and do something else.

[KayC]

6 hours ago, Nancy2 said:

Me too.  I want to ignore the holidays and do something else.

 

Then do.

7 hours ago, Sar123 said:

They knew I had nowhere to go. They actually thought they were being helpful

Oh man, can I relate. It's Father's Day, everyone known my husband died on Father's Day, yet not one call or invite.

[Sar123]

5 hours ago, KayC said:

It's Father's Day, everyone known my husband died on Father's Day, yet not one call or invite

I’m so sorry that no one called you or invited you on Father’s Day especially since your husband died on that very day. It must be a hard day for you to get through. 
 

12 hours ago, Nancy2 said:

  I want to ignore the holidays and do something else.

I’m planning on doing exactly that for Thanksgiving this year. My daughter and my son and his family are looking into going to Puerto Vallarta during the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s will be too hard not having him here this year so I suggested we all go to PV this year and they agreed. 

[KayC]

Sar123, I like this idea.

[shawnt]

I have worried about traditions. Do I keep doing what the family has done when she was alive and try and normalize the loss or do we start a new tradition ? Maybe some of the traditions were lost with her and an attempt to keep them alive will be hollow and painful without the joy of her 

[KayC]

One of the traditions I've kept is putting up a tree. I'm getting older and may need help getting a tree up this year.  I hate asking people for help but I love putting up George's ornaments, it's definitely a memory tree.  It's a new one and needs "bolted" together but alas I have no strength.  I liked my old tree but the lights went out, I shouldn't have thrown it away, should have bought more lights.

[Griefsucks810]

On 6/17/2023 at 10:10 PM, widower2 said:

Great post Kay.

Aug and esp Oct are my "bad" months. Aug is the month of my beloved's as well as my sister's birthday...and ironically, Oct is the month they both passed (and also my birthday month ugh). And because our so-called "friends" disappeared on me, my birthdays are usually spent alone. If I could skip from Sept to Mar every year, I would!

August is my bad month cuz it’s my birthday (8/10), my moms birthday (8/13) my late grandmother birthday (8/16) and when my husband died on 8/21/19.  My mom still makes my birthday a big deal to her; I used to celebrate my birthday with family and friends when I was younger; now that I’m older it’s just another day to me.  

[Griefsucks810]

On 6/18/2023 at 11:08 PM, Sar123 said:

I’m so sorry that no one called you or invited you on Father’s Day especially since your husband died on that very day. It must be a hard day for you to get through. 
 

I’m planning on doing exactly that for Thanksgiving this year. My daughter and my son and his family are looking into going to Puerto Vallarta during the Thanksgiving holiday. It’s will be too hard not having him here this year so I suggested we all go to PV this year and they agreed. 

That’s a great idea!! Maybe I can talk my daughter into taking a tropical vacation to the Bahamas for Christmas next year.