Lifting the Lid on Funerals and End of Life Care | Personal blog
Lifting the Lid on Funerals and End of Life Care
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16.01.2022 Recently I wrote about the early days of grief that devastation zone where nothing makes sense, and words of intended comfort just grate. Support, true supp...ort, can be extremely hard to find. Otherwise intelligent, kind, compassionate people just don’t know what to do in the face of your grief. It’s not entirely their fault. We don’t talk about the reality of grief in our culture. In fact, our culture seems to wear a massive set of reality-blinders when it comes to grief. How can any of us learn how to support each other if we can’t talk openly about what grief is? We’ve got this idea that there are only two options in grief: you’re either going to be stuck in your pain, doomed to spend the rest of your life rocking in a corner in your basement wearing sack cloth, or you’re going to triumph over grief, be transformed and come back even better than you were before. Two options. On-off. Broken or healed. It doesn’t seem to matter that nothing else in life is like that. Somehow, when it comes to grief, the entire breadth of human experience goes out the window. There’s this whole middle ground between those two extremes (as there is for everything else in life), but we don’t know how to talk about it. We don’t know how to talk about grief if we step outside that pervasive cultural model of entirely healed or irrevocably broken. We don’t know how to talk about living inside grief. Living alongside grief. When I’m creating something for you, whether it’s a blog post, a public talk, or a new course, I think about that narrow band of options. I just can’t work inside that space it’s not real. I don’t operate in the transformation model. I can’t give a happy ending to things. I can’t tie things up in a pretty bow and say, Everything’s going to be okay, and you’re going to be even better than before, because I don’t believe that and it’s not true. At the same time, I can’t leave you with no message to live into. I can’t just say, sorry, this is going to suck forever and ever, and you’ll never feel any different. I can’t leave you, or anyone, down in that basement rocking in the corner. That’s not appropriate either. Finding that middle ground is the real work of grief my work, and yours. Each of us, each one of us, has to find our way into that middle ground. A place the doesn’t ask us to deny our grief, and doesn’t doom us forever. A place that honors the full breadth of grief, which is really the full breadth of love. What would that middle ground look like for you? It’s a big question. Your answers will shift and change over time, from the early days of grief through life outside the initial devastation zone. When we stake out ground in the middle, there’s room for all the experiences of being alive: the good, the horrifying, the beautiful, and the broken. Nothing is left out. Nothing is inherently wrong. What a relief to have more than two options. As always, I love to hear from you. Leave a comment and tell me about your middle ground. #megandevine #refugeingrief #itsokthatyourenotok #griefrevolution #griefsupport #lifeafterloss #griefsucks #brokenheart #grief #griefandloss #bereavement #loss #imissyou #mentalhealth #selfcare #selfkindness #cancersucks #fuckcancer #miscarriage #stillborn #pregnancyloss #infantloss #childloss #chronicpain #chronicillness #spoonie #invisibleillness #chronicillnesswarrior #depressionhelp #dementia #howtohelp #normalizegrief
15.01.2022 Why is it that when we speak the truth about what hurts, we’re deemed angry or too negative or not evolved enough? We’ve got such a global gag order on telling ...the truth. We’ve got such resistance to hearing really hearing that there is pain in this life that can’t be made better. Some things cannot be fixed, they can only be carried. We have this idea that when somebody says, "Ow. I'm in a really rough place and things hurt a lot," we've decided that that's being negative. That's not being negative. It means you're giving an accurate representation of what it feels like to be you right now. When I talk about how badly we support people when they're grieving, I get hate mail that says things like, "You need to lighten up. You're so negative. You have to know that people have the best of intentions. You need to cut them some slack." Good intentions are not enough. Each time I open a new community space for the #writingyourgrief course, I’m always struck by the number of people who say, this is the first place I can be completely honest about my grief. Many of you have told me that rather than tell people their words aren’t helpful, you choose to stop speaking all together. When you stop telling the truth because other people don’t like it that’s a gigantic, un-necessary injustice on top of your pain. Having your truth dismissed always feels bad. I don’t like it when it’s done to me, and I hate it when it’s done to you. I’m not immune to fits of anger when it comes to this. Personally, I believe in what the mystics call holy outrage the anger that fuels truth-telling. It’s the anger that points out injustice and silencing, not just to make a scene, but because it knows what true community might be. Holy outrage means telling the truth, no matter who gets offended by the telling. And equally important, it means doing so in service of more love, more support, more kinship and true connection. So I’m going to keep on doing what I’m doing, preferring to offend some rather than silence myself. And you, too: please keep speaking the truth. Telling the truth about what hurts lets others know it’s okay to tell their truth. Together, we can change this emotionally illiterate, shame-based culture that has so little capacity to say, I acknowledge your pain. I am here with you. Together, we can make this life kinder, more compassionate, more gentle, for everyone the lovers and the haters alike. That's what we're doing in the #GriefRevolution Patreon community: https://www.patreon.com/megandevine I’d love to see you in the writing course where telling the truth is what we do. Together. Follow this link join the next session. We begin together on April 20th: https://www.refugeingrief.com/30daywriting/ How about you? What’s your experience around truth-telling, silencing, and holy outrage? Where are the places you get to tell the whole truth of your grief? #megandevine #refugeingrief #itsokthatyourenotok #griefrevolution #griefsupport #lifeafterloss #griefsucks #brokenheart #grief #griefandloss #bereavement #loss #imissyou #mentalhealth #selfcare #selfkindness #cancersucks #fuckcancer #miscarriage #stillborn #pregnancyloss #infantloss #childloss #chronicpain #chronicillness #spoonie #invisibleillness #chronicillnesswarrior #depressionhelp #dementia #howtohelp #normalizegrief
11.01.2022 A friend shared this and I really liked the lesson! *original poster (Kate Scott 2020)*: RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE. When I was at one of my lowest (mental) poin...ts in life, I couldn’t get out of bed some days. I had no energy or motivation and was barely getting by. I had therapy once per week, and on this particular week I didn’t have much to ‘bring’ to the session. He asked how my week was and I really had nothing to say. What are you struggling with? he asked. I gestured around me and said I dunno man. Life. Not satisfied with my answer, he said No, what exactly are you worried about right now? What feels overwhelming? When you go home after this session, what issue will be staring at you? I knew the answer, but it was so ridiculous that I didn’t want to say it. I wanted to have something more substantial. Something more profound. But I didn’t. So I told him, Honestly? The dishes. It’s stupid, I know, but the more I look at them the more I CAN’T do them because I’ll have to scrub them before I put them in the dishwasher, because the dishwasher sucks, and I just can’t stand and scrub the dishes. I felt like an idiot even saying it. What kind of grown ass woman is undone by a stack of dishes? There are people out there with *actual* problems, and I’m whining to my therapist about dishes? But my therapist nodded in understanding and then said: RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE. I began to tell him that you’re not supposed to, but he stopped me. Why the hell aren’t you supposed to? If you don’t want to scrub the dishes and your dishwasher sucks, run it twice. Run it three times, who cares?! Rules do not exist, so stop giving yourself rules. It blew my mind in a way that I don’t think I can properly express. That day, I went home and tossed my smelly dishes haphazardly into the dishwasher and ran it three times. I felt like I had conquered a dragon. The next day, I took a shower lying down. A few days later. I folded my laundry and put them wherever the fuck they fit. There were no longer arbitrary rules I had to follow, and it gave me the freedom to make accomplishments again. Now that I’m in a healthier place, I rinse off my dishes and put them in the dishwasher properly. I shower standing up. I sort my laundry. But at a time when living was a struggle instead of a blessing, I learned an incredibly important lesson: THERE ARE NO RULES. RUN THE DISHWASHER TWICE!!!
11.01.2022 Finding comfort in dark humor is #perfectlynormal in grief. This one often comes as a surprise to non-grieving people, as though having a sense of humor isn't ...possible after loss. But for many grieving folx, sometimes dark humor is the only possible response. Those who've taken the #WritingYourGrief course (https://www.refugeingrief.com/30daywriting/) can attest to the fact that dark grief humor is par for the course. How about you? How has grief affected your sense of humor? The more we talk about this stuff, the more we tell the truth about what grief is really like, the more people realize they're not alone. #Grief is hard. It impacts every aspect of life, big and small. There are so many things grieving people experience, things they do or don't do, that they (or the outside world) might think are unusual or weird, but are actually perfectly normal. You aren't weird. You're grieving. The problem is, people often don't realize they're normal until they discover they aren't alone in feeling a certain way or doing a particular thing. And feeling alone makes grief even harder than it already is. Because it's such a relief to find out we're not alone, we're creating a series of posts acknowledging as many of those things as we can, one #perfectlynormal thing at a time. Want to share something with project #perfectlynormal? Contribute here: https://bit.ly/2PgggN4 Submissions are anonymous. Share as many things as you like. These posts were created using contributions from people just like you and our awesome #GriefRevolution patrons: https://www.patreon.com/megandevine #megandevine #refugeingrief #itsokthatyourenotok #griefrevolution #griefsupport #griefsucks #brokenheart #griefandloss #bereavement #loss #imissyou #mentalhealth #cancersucks #fuckcancer #miscarriage #stillborn #pregnancyloss #infantloss #dementia #childloss #chronicpain #chronicillness #spoonie #invisibleillness #depressionhelp #normalizegrief
05.01.2022 There’s a side of grief the world doesn’t see. Crying alone in the car, the shower, the grocery store when you see their favorite food, in your bed in the middl...e of the night. Where are your safe places to freely grieve? #SayTheirNames this #holiday season. It’s the best gift you can give a grieving heart. It takes a village. Join ours. ABedForMyHeart.com Get the #1 best-selling book, You Are the #Mother of All #Mothers. A gorgeous #gift #book for #grieving #moms. Give the gift of #hope this holiday season. ABedForMyHeart.com/shop/
