BlissQuest: What is Left Not Grieved?

Fall Garden: The Asparagus Bed

Listening to: Swedish Rock? Yep, brand new though it looks and sounds like the 60's.

Bliss: I am already looking forward to dinner -- gluten free pizza. I'm all about the food! And tomorrow night, a friend is having a birthday dinner for me, to start off my birthday week. Six days and counting until the big 4-0.

It's so curious: one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief. But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.
~Colette

This is what it's been like having the energy and giant joy of a kitten enter this house. Lilly has brought so much happiness that she has uncovered the sad that I still hadn't worked through.

Grief, mourning...it all takes so much longer than any list of steps would have you believe. It comes and goes and comes again, a surprise that blindsides you when you least expect it, when you think that you are finally through it.

But I don't really think there is ever any getting through it. Yes, we get to the point where the feeling of it is not as powerful, not as able to knock us down, take away our breath, but I don't think the process is ever finished. That loved one will always be missed.

At the same time, this is what keeps the love alive, what keeps your relationship to that loved one evolving.

Because even beyond death, there is relationship. At least in my book.

In this culture, grief is something to hide from others and something to get over and move on from.

I think that this is a large part of the reason there is so much diagnosed depression in our day and age. There are all these wounded, grieving people walking around. And their wounds are open and infected, having never been tended to.

Grief is a story, and when we don't tell that story and construct something positive from it, it hurts us.

Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak
whispers the o'er-fraught heart and bids it break.
~William Shakespeare

There is more to grieve in this life than the loss of a loved one and thus the large masses of depressed individuals.

We don't see to it that we properly grieve a childhood unlived, parents who were not parents, dreams unrealized, parts of ourselves that have been lost...all of it needs to be grieved and the story of it needs to be told, as many times as it takes.

Right now, I think about all the joy we are feeling over President Elect Obama, but I think that it will very soon bring up a lot of pain and anger over the last eight years and the death and destruction they have brought.

And it is only right that we talk about it, get it out, cry, and scream until its power is no more.

We acquire the strength we have overcome.
~Ralph Waldo Emerson

Again, what we are talking about is repression. Repressed emotions just end up coming out in counterproductive ways. But expressed emotions, even when they feel rotten, the energy of them ends up creating something new and good, something that couldn't have been otherwise.

And repressed emotions, grief we haven't grieved, it all holds us back from our bliss, it all stifles our creative powers.

So what is it that you've not grieved? What sadness have you stuffed deep down and need to invite up and into the light?

She was no longer wrestling with the grief,
but could sit down with it as a lasting
companion and make it a sharer in her thoughts.
~George Eliot