I'm sorry that I didn't set a timer, but I'm going to do a sharp transition to grief. If you want to pause and set one for 3 minutes, go ahead, apparently that's the right amount of time if you don't want to have a meltdown.
So, there's an article cirulating about how many of us are experiencing grief in this new world we're in- both the things that are lost right now (like seeing each other, sense of stability/normalcy) and the impending loss of people we love. Like many of you I've grieved before, plenty of times. The first time I had real grief was right now, 18 years ago, when my best friend was in a drug induced coma fighting to live, and eventually died a little less than a week later.
My memory is fuzzy, but I remembered him being in the hospital for close to two weeks. He died on April 3. I write about this just about every year, because it's important to me and he's important to me, and also Lent (when I do this blog) is always during March, and I never don't think about him in March. I was already remembering my grief a lot this month. The memories that I have have a lot of feeling in them, but also are really blurry. I remember the day he died my mom got a call early in the morning. I knew she got the call because I could hear her crying. I knew, but I just couldn't know, so I pretended like I was still sleeping so I wouldn't have to hear it and I could keep pretending like he wasn't dead. They let me "sleep" for a while longer and finally my parents came and sat on my bed while I yelled at them to stop telling me because I didn't want to know. That memory is really dizzy to me. I don't know how else to explain it other than to say that grief is dizzy. It's like the world just starts spinning? Every time I say that to someone who's had grief, they usually nod.
I felt that very familiar dizziness these last couple of weeks. At first I tried to talk myself out of it- like no one I know is dying right now, is it really the end of the world that you have to stay at home?, you are perfectly safe at home, tons of people have it way worse, who knows what is going to happen, etc. And those things are true, but also grief doesn't come only when your brain or other people deem it worthy, it just comes. When there's loss, there is grief.
The best advice I ever got about grief was when I was in the early days of grieving Matt's death. One of my pastors had a lost a son years before. He said the most important thing for him in his grief was to set aside time for it. Make room for the grief. Sometimes he'd set a timer. For an hour, two, three? He'd acknowledge all that was lost, and when the timer beeped, he'd go do something else. Something that brought him joy, something that was normal, something that reminded him that he was alive. So, I did that. I'm not sure that I actually set a timer, but I carved out time for it. I wrote Matt letters of things I wished I would have said outloud, I listened to the same moody music over and over again, I watched A Walk to Remember so I could cry when I really needed to cry, thought about good memories. It helped. The time I carved out got shorter. The grief changed shape, and I didn't need to be as intentional about it as time went on. Now, it's usually just March that I need to set aside time and remember the sadness of the love that I lost.
Anyway, I wonder if that's wise to think about right now. As a lot of us are grieving again? Stay with the grief for a while. Then do things that bring you some joy. Laugh a bunch at stupid jokes and play- it won't diminish the gravity of the situation we're in. But if you have grief, you do have to experience the grief. Just set a timer. Maybe slightly more than 3 minutes though.
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