Grieving the Living

Sometimes I ask myself what I will do if I see you in Costco or on the street walking your dog? Sometimes that fantasy is nice. I would smile and wish you well but I wouldnt approach you to avoid an interaction we both dont want to have. It would be both painful, awful and also beautiful, and lovely to see you and share air for a second. 

How do you grieve the living? How do you move on from something so primal and so engrained in your DNA? And similarly, how do you say goodbye to the fantasy of what you will never have? 

I think I avoided these questions for a long time. I did a lot of dancing around and people pleasing so that I wouldnt have to ask myself how to grieve a fantasy, and how to grieve the living. It was a concept that felt, and sometimes still feels too overwhelming to process and sink in to. 

In my work I have learned that many adult  children have been grieving all their lives. They have been denying their desires for an attuned, available, mature, leader and caregiver. The denial feels better than the painful realization that they did not have that. It feels better to do the people pleasing dance of prioritizing someone else’s emotional well being than facing our own. It feels better to look at someone elses problems than to be faced with our own. 

When we are numb to the grief, we are also in denial about the dynamic.

Here is what i mean by that; 

As long as we can pretend that this person we are in relationship with us is not harming us, has good intentions, cant handle our boundaries or emotions, than we get to keep the dynamic the same and our nervous systems feel safe in “same”. But they are actually only really safe in safety. 

My 25 year old rain jacket might be comfortable but it doesnt keep me dry. And the moment I realize that, I have to grieve that rain jacket. So instead, I walk around wet as hell. 

Grief is love with no where to go. Grief is active, underlying, and sometimes all consuming. It looks as unique as the person who is experiencing it. It is longing, yearning, for something that isnt there, sometimes was never there, and will never be there again. 

I wish I could give my clients (estranged adult children) and myself our childhoods back. But I cant. So we grieve. Together.