Good Days and Bad Days and THE DATE

Everyday I miss Di.
I have good days and I have bad days and I have very bad days.

Some days it's the physical trials and tribulations that stop me like a deer in the road and make me shudder.  It can make me stop in my tracks, and it takes my breath away and I feel like I'm hyperventilating as the tears well up in my eyes and my heart feels like it's beating a million miles an hour or more.

This doesn't happen all the time but it happens. 

It doesn't happen as much as it used to but it still happens nonetheless. 

But, the pain of loss is not related to only the physical type; it's also the mental anguish of the loss and the burden of the loss on our psyche.  The utilization of  subjective emotional experience when looking at death and the traumatic upheaveal of it forces us to delve into arenas in our brain that sometimes are unequipped or unable to cope. 

Mentally, I have 'triggers' that knock me back and I find that it happens often times when I look at the calendar no matter where it's at - home, work, my computer, my scheduler; anything that has a calendar on it takes my mind back to THE DATE.  The mental emotional draw of losing Di is a constant blip on my radar.  

It's hard to go through life without a calendar; we are all so reliant on dates.
Can you live your life in hours and not dates and still function correctly and fully?  

The reason I felt compelled to write about this is because I don't think that people talk about grief and loss enough.  Maybe people are ashamed to cry in front of others, in public.  Maybe this is why grief is confined to the dark places in our lives and people don't show their sadness outwardly as often as they should.  The saying "wearing your heart on your sleeve" is a very powerful one and I think it's abused more than it's used.  People grieve for years, for decades and for their entire lives.   

You never stop missing someone that you really loved.  Someone who made you feel good with just a look or a smile is so very powerful and important.  How many people in your life do you really cherish you and how much will you hurt when they are gone?  Think about it.  It's integral to our psyche that we 'have' those people in our lives that make what we're doing worth it all. 
I will always grieve this loss.  But, I am blessed to have Di's loss to grieve because having this loss means that all those moments, those years, those 'things', those hugs, those talks, those questions and those answers were all worth it for me.
The poet, Alice Walker has a book entitled Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth: New Poems and in it she writes about how the powers of love and acceptance within grief are the same "As Gold".  It's true. 

Life and loss is Gold, it's a treasure, it's a prize, it's something that we should never take for granted and we should clench it tight in our grips and know that we are the lucky ones who have the power to hold this "gold" when we experience loss.

This is written on the cusp of Di's interment service. 
We will all finally have a "place" and Di will have another "place".
Amen.
Cathy