I Have Experienced Loss
[b]Before I get on with it.. if you're reading this, I just want you to know that I'm not trying to offend anyone with whatever it is, you may read here. I'm treating this as sort of mental relief for myself, so I'm just writing about my point of view, my thoughts, my experiences. Sort of a diary, for anyone to read. Anonymity is great, isn't it?[/b]
Grief counseling. Why have you ever wondered why do people go there? Yes, it’s all in the pamphlet – it’s a form of therapy that’s supposedly going to help you get through the pain that’s caused after you lose someone. It sounds really nice, doesn’t it? You just go to one of those meetings, you wait and watch, listen and after a while you open up and start talking yourself. Some people leave really quickly, some need more time, new faces appear, they’re all supporting each other. Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? There is no ultimate cure for grief. There’s not a single book that’s written about it and has universal clues on how to actually managed your life after you lose someone close to you. Because something like this does not exist. Just because something worked out for you does not meant it’s going to work out for someone else. That would be way too easy and we all know that life’s anything but that. So you know what I think? I think people go there, because they want to hear about other people’s misfortunes. Humans are an incredibly selfish spices. Especially nowadays, when we’ve evolved so much we think we have and know everything, when frankly, it’s pretty much the opposite. We work really hard to achieve our dreams and only a small group of people actually gets to do that. Nevertheless we still do try and we’re truly brokenhearted when the person sitting next to us gets a promotion we thought we deserved. We hate it, when other people succeed. Not out in the open, of course. That won’t do. We have to put on a mask and gracefully accept our defeat, but when the doors are closed, when we make sure we won’t be disturbed, we feel that internal itch. That little voice in the back of our head saying that we were the ones that deserved to get that promotion. We were supposed to be the ones that won the lottery. It was meant to be. Except, that it really wasn’t. So we feel pretty bad, think about it for a short period of the evening, go to sleep, wake up, get ready for work and make sure to put on that same supportive mask that’s saying ‘way to go, neighbor! I’m so happy for you!’, when inside we want nothing but to smack their face, take their raise and perhaps go on holiday to a place that’s really far away. We hate it, when other people succeed. What we do love, however, is to see them fail. Now, I’m not saying that we go to the support group meetings to hear that someone else’s mother has died and that information’s going to make us feel happy – we’re not that depraved, at least not all of us. But for some reason, we do love to suffer with other people. See that they’re going through a similar thing. That we’re not the only ones that feel this way. That it’s not just our world that’s falling apart. But why exactly do we do that? If it’s so hard for us to support people when their at their best, why do we so desperately cling to other’s when we’re at the bottom? After all none’s going to helps us. Not because they don’t want to, although I think that in a way that may also be a partial reason – why should they feel better so soon after it’s happened, when we’re still crying our eyes out? It’s because there’s nothing we can do for those people. Loss is a terrible thing. No matter how hard you try to reason with it in your own head, you just can’t. Even though on a rational side, it makes perfect sense for someone who’s suffered a few heart attacks to finally die. Nevertheless we can’t make sense of it. We start to blame everything and everyone: the universe, God (if you believe in this sort of thing), medicine, the doctors.. everything and everyone’s to blame – first, for the death of the person we love, second for not being able to help us feel better. It takes us so long to realize that no matter how good other people’s intentions may be, they can’t help us, because we’re the only ones with that kind of power. We’re searching for a cure for so long, that it’s almost impossible for us to notice, that we carry it inside of us. It’s within each and every single one of us. This Australian band wrote a song called Colourblind and one of the verses says [i]“we are the sickness and the symptom and the cure”[/i] and as hard as it is to accept, that’s the case. No one else is going to carry our pain for us, the weight of that is on our shoulders. So we need to stop running, trying to find the impossible, when it is all within our reach, if we just close our eyes.
Grief counseling. Why have you ever wondered why do people go there? Yes, it’s all in the pamphlet – it’s a form of therapy that’s supposedly going to help you get through the pain that’s caused after you lose someone. It sounds really nice, doesn’t it? You just go to one of those meetings, you wait and watch, listen and after a while you open up and start talking yourself. Some people leave really quickly, some need more time, new faces appear, they’re all supporting each other. Sounds almost too good to be true, doesn’t it? There is no ultimate cure for grief. There’s not a single book that’s written about it and has universal clues on how to actually managed your life after you lose someone close to you. Because something like this does not exist. Just because something worked out for you does not meant it’s going to work out for someone else. That would be way too easy and we all know that life’s anything but that. So you know what I think? I think people go there, because they want to hear about other people’s misfortunes. Humans are an incredibly selfish spices. Especially nowadays, when we’ve evolved so much we think we have and know everything, when frankly, it’s pretty much the opposite. We work really hard to achieve our dreams and only a small group of people actually gets to do that. Nevertheless we still do try and we’re truly brokenhearted when the person sitting next to us gets a promotion we thought we deserved. We hate it, when other people succeed. Not out in the open, of course. That won’t do. We have to put on a mask and gracefully accept our defeat, but when the doors are closed, when we make sure we won’t be disturbed, we feel that internal itch. That little voice in the back of our head saying that we were the ones that deserved to get that promotion. We were supposed to be the ones that won the lottery. It was meant to be. Except, that it really wasn’t. So we feel pretty bad, think about it for a short period of the evening, go to sleep, wake up, get ready for work and make sure to put on that same supportive mask that’s saying ‘way to go, neighbor! I’m so happy for you!’, when inside we want nothing but to smack their face, take their raise and perhaps go on holiday to a place that’s really far away. We hate it, when other people succeed. What we do love, however, is to see them fail. Now, I’m not saying that we go to the support group meetings to hear that someone else’s mother has died and that information’s going to make us feel happy – we’re not that depraved, at least not all of us. But for some reason, we do love to suffer with other people. See that they’re going through a similar thing. That we’re not the only ones that feel this way. That it’s not just our world that’s falling apart. But why exactly do we do that? If it’s so hard for us to support people when their at their best, why do we so desperately cling to other’s when we’re at the bottom? After all none’s going to helps us. Not because they don’t want to, although I think that in a way that may also be a partial reason – why should they feel better so soon after it’s happened, when we’re still crying our eyes out? It’s because there’s nothing we can do for those people. Loss is a terrible thing. No matter how hard you try to reason with it in your own head, you just can’t. Even though on a rational side, it makes perfect sense for someone who’s suffered a few heart attacks to finally die. Nevertheless we can’t make sense of it. We start to blame everything and everyone: the universe, God (if you believe in this sort of thing), medicine, the doctors.. everything and everyone’s to blame – first, for the death of the person we love, second for not being able to help us feel better. It takes us so long to realize that no matter how good other people’s intentions may be, they can’t help us, because we’re the only ones with that kind of power. We’re searching for a cure for so long, that it’s almost impossible for us to notice, that we carry it inside of us. It’s within each and every single one of us. This Australian band wrote a song called Colourblind and one of the verses says [i]“we are the sickness and the symptom and the cure”[/i] and as hard as it is to accept, that’s the case. No one else is going to carry our pain for us, the weight of that is on our shoulders. So we need to stop running, trying to find the impossible, when it is all within our reach, if we just close our eyes.
31-35, F
