Navigating the journey

Grief, in and of itself, is very isolating.  Regardless of if someone you know has gone through the same exact thing, everyone’s experience is different.  How I view things, how I handle things or feel about things, is totally different than my friend who lost his father less than two months before my mom passed or my friend who lost her mom when we were 22.  Grief makes you feel very alone.  No one can ever really, truly understand your pain or what you endure every day.  No one knows what you feel when you look at a calendar and see your loved one’s birthday, anniversary, your own birthday, other events like holidays that you shared with them;  no one else understands just how it feels to see your loved one’s name, date of birth and an end date on a head stone.  No one else will ever really understand what it feels like to be in your shoes.  Grief makes you feel like you are alone in a sea of people who don’t or can’t see you, who you really are, and the pain you’re in every day.  You can go to counseling, you can go to group therapy sessions to listen to how other people are doing it and going through ‘the process’, but everyone’s journey is their own.  I may decide to toss a letter into the ocean to try to communicate with the other side, while someone else may choose to throw themselves into work so they can pretend the death never happened.  Everyone is different – I like ketchup and mayo on my cheeseburger, someone else may think that’s disgusting –this is a process that is individualized at its center.  No matter what I say to someone, they don’t really know what it’s like to be in my head and in my world every day.  It’s a process that you have to work through on your own and, although there are resources some might find to be helpful, in the end everyone dictates what they do along the road to make it as bearable a trip as possible.  For me, the journey has been a dark one with little spots of sunshine along the way; today, I feel like I lost my map and I’m just meandering around, lost, not sure of where to go next, feeling like I’ve seen that metaphorical rock/tree/bush before.  This is just a repeat of what I went through and I thought it was a part of the journey that was over, but apparently I’m just traveling around in a circle. (You know that part of the movie National Lampoon’s European Vacation – “look kids – Big Ben!  Parliament!” that’s my life right now.)