It's Been Awhile...... Life went left

Hey there again! I know it has been awhile since I last wrote. Boy oh boy, did life go left for awhile. I have had several things happen over the last 6-9 months and I let this blog fall to the wayside. I realize now how much good it does me to share my thoughts, feelings, experiences and more with you all on here. I want to continue to do so.

Well, let's see, where do I start.......

I have suffered a lot of loss over the last year and have been through more trials than I can count. I lost one of my best friends at the beginning of April, last March and June we lost my best friends parents, just three short months apart. I helped the friend who passed away during a year of cancer struggle and I had different people in my life, go through and are still going through some significant difficulties.

Of course, there has been joy too and in those moments when I felt like I couldn't take much more, I held on to those moments. I still do. It is funny how we remember the good and the bad. How we process both of those types of experience is different for everyone.

Today is my best friends moms birthday, the first one without her here. It is hard. Grief is hard. Some days you wake up and you are okay, able to put one foot in front of the other, able to make decisions to continue to move forward with your life but always keeping them in your heart and mind each passing moment of the day, their memory never to far from your thoughts. Than out of nowhere grief hits you, like a ton of bricks dropped from fifteen stories up. You are immobilized, you are frozen. Frozen in the moment between missing them, trying to not remember the bad and sometimes not wanting to remember the good (because it is just too painful).

After some time, it gets a little bit easier to breath. Easier to push those memories to the back of our mind and be able to function again in our day to day. Eventually we come out of the fog a little bit but at any moment, we know, the darkness of our grief can pull us back in.

So than what do we do? We lean into others, we seek our therapy if we need to, we find how to make new memories, good memories without our loved ones and we hold on to the hope that one day we may see them again. Of course, I am a Godly woman but in all honesty, I am not sure I know what Heaven is like but I do know that if the hope of seeing our loved ones once again is what keeps us going, than that's what matters.

Grief is like a body of water that you throw a pebble into, when the pebble (thought) hits the water, the ripples move outwards, towards the bank of the water. Eventually the ripples go away until another pebble is thrown. Our job is to remember the beauty in those ripples, the beauty in the good memories and the beauty in knowing our time together with our loved ones who have passed is the memories that keep us going.

We miss them, we love them and we remember them. I miss my best friends parents who were like parents to me. I miss my best friend, an older man who was a confidant, honest, loving, caring and charismatic. His recent passing opened the wound that had not yet healed from the previous losses this past year. I miss my grandmothers, women who showed me the way to be, women I admired and women I love dearly. All of this grief, sometimes is hard to endure but at the end of the day we keep going, not for us but for them.

Happy Birthday Shari! We miss you, we love you and we remember you always <3