Grief Monster
"More the kisses, letters mingle souls. For thus friends absent speak"
~John Donne~
Grief is a monster, I don't mean the classic horror genre style, all teeth, claws and menace, but an unknown - an unspeakable force. My own journey through grief definitely brought me face to face with the Monster. At first it was a terrifying and overwhelming presence, a total stranger. It took a long time to begin to to approach the Monster, learn to sit with it it rather than simply react. The path is not linear and there is no roadmap or steady timeline to coping with grief.
Over the past two years I have kept a grief journal, documenting my journey and progress in understanding grief. I have started going back and reading those entries and this blog is a way to add reflection and introspection from my current perspective as well as adding new ideas and hopefully a few useful tools for other people to use.
That was one of the most striking realizations I faced when my father died. For the most part no one had the tools to discuss death and certainly didn't know how to approach grieving. I tried, sometimes unsuccessfully, to forgive people for not having the language or understanding that I was looking for and it certainly was an eye opener into how our culture approaches death and how we are not done any favors by avoiding it.