How do you put it gently? I tried, but I clearly didn’t do a good job of it.
Loneliness is part of loss.
My neighbor, who just a couple of months ago, lost her husband to bone cancer, was honest when I asked her how she was doing.
“I’m not doing so good,” she said. Tears followed and through the sobs came the words, “I’m just so lonely.”
She was all bundled-up, shovel in hand and many inches of snow to go before her driveway would be clear. She said the shoveling helped clear her head and give her something else to think about. She said sitting in “their” living room just makes her long for the days when they sat there, together. He would read, she would talk and there was always classical music playing in the background.
Years of togetherness and now a new life with many adjustments.
A living room that’s just a room now.
It makes her so sad to
February 18, 2014 @ 9:26 am
That is often my answer when someone asks how I’m doing….I’m so terribly lonely. I hate the darkness and weekends and holidays off. I try not to be a downer when coworkers ask about my weekend but they are rarely good. I am an independent person and not afraid to go and do by myself but there’s just no pleasure in it. The silence truly is deafening.
February 17, 2014 @ 8:28 pm
Grief wants each of us to find our own way through the pain. The pain is exquisite at first, has a rawness that no words salve, leaves us too tender. However much we eventually work our way through it, the pain of loss never entirely disappears, because we don’t stop loving the one we love; it just gets pushed down, until finally we feel like we can breathe again. And that new first breath is like seeing the ocean, noticing the sun’s rise, or remembering the first kiss for the first time.
February 17, 2014 @ 8:00 pm
It’s hard to accept that new normal, what was is no more, the what if’s are all around as are the memories, how do we carry on? You wake up and the cycle starts all over till you’re worn to a frazzle and about to break.
But then comes a time when it’s a little easier to accept this new normal. Slowly the hope returns and the process of one foot after the other begins.
It is never an easy process, the darkness does like to return, but you just keep putting that foot in front of the other one and continue to look for the happy memories and the hope they bring.