Bouncing Back From Grief

We are often expected to bounce back from grief.  Our nearest and dearest can be impatient with what they perceive as our lingering. Pressuring us to move on almost always creates a niggle of wrong doing inside of us.  Nobody is pressuring me to move on but then I am not talking about it every day so it really has little impact on anybody else. 

In my grief over the loss of my dog I’ve connected with a deeper older grief that I have not set free.   And that older grief scratched the surface of an even older grief.  It seems like the deeper I dig, the more I dig up.  Because I cannot remember the source of my older grief all I can face is a nagging feeling.

I did not used to know that much of what I was experiencing was grief, because I did not know to identify the feeling with that name.   One old grief that thrust itself forward was coming home from school one day to find the giant teddy bear that I had been given was gone.  It was taken without my permission nor warning by my stepmother while I was away.  This was a fairly deep betrayal. I hadn’t even had the bear very long.  It was a hand-me-down toy from a distant relative.  I was in sheer awe of it.  I could barely believe it was my very own.  That is kind of how I felt about Maggie.  I could barely believe such a creature was my very own.  I don’t feel betrayed by Maggie and I certainly don’t blame her, but as I look back at that older grief over the teddy bear, it was grief over a loss of a toy, but it was also grief over the betrayal by someone I was supposed to trust.

When someone takes something that is dear to your heart and destroys it or gives it away, they are not respecting you.  Had it been the potato that I was growing in the closet that would have been a lot different.  That was an experiment, a search for knowledge.  My heart was not involved.  Had I been growing the potato at the time the teddy bear went missing, I would not have thought twice about it being gone.  I must have known that growing a potato in the bedroom was not acceptable or I would not have hidden it in the closet.

I do know that when I tried to find out what happened to the teddy bear, I was told that it was donated to the fire department.  I already knew better than to ask why or to show my real feelings. I had already seen how she had given my youngest sister a hamster and when they came back from the honeymoon, she took it away from her and gave it to her two-year-old son.

  
By that time, I rarely showed my real feelings to anybody.  Even today, I don’t express my deepest feelings to people very often and when I do, I am very cautious about who I am telling.  I don’t believe I have to tell anybody about my deep feelings but I also believe that in order to make the growth spurts I expect out of myself I need to create a space to express these things to myself.  In this safe expression, I can release old hidden fears that hold me back.

As I allow myself to process the grief of the loss of another valued pet, I am not distracting myself from it or where it is taking me.  I’m pulling out old events and feelings and laying them in front of myself on paper.  Those meanderings are deeply private and I won’t share them, but the process of doing it is setting more of my old buried grief free. 

I am not defined by my circumstances.

Sincerely, Carmen Davis