It's been 12years this month for me and I can honestly say we are living again, but it takes time. Be kind to yourself, and take every day a minute at a time.
Someone sent me this analogy in the early days and it really made sense to me.
Imgine a glass jar and 3 balls: a large one, a medium one and a small one. The ball is my grief and the glass jar is my world. The way people, including me, expect grief to go is that initially, like the large ball in the jar,it takes over my entire world. It leaves no space to breathe, do or think of anything else. Then after a while, maybe after the first year, the grief shrinks. The ball is now a medium size and fits in the jar with some space around it. My grief is less, I have space to do other things in my world. After a while more, maybe after 2-3 years, the ball is now a small size. It fits in the jar that is my world easily. I could even ignore that it is there some times if I want to.
Does that sound familiar? Does that sound like your idea of grief? It certainly was my idea of grief before. Well, it is bullshit.
The ball of grief does not shrink. I don't want it to. It is the only thing I have left. What shrinks when you lose someone is your world.
So imagine this: at first, the ball of grief only just fits in the glass jar that is my world. There is no space to breathe or think of anything else. After a while, I am ready to expand my world a little. It is not the ball that shrinks, but the glass jar that goes up in size. As I venture out in to the world again, as I meet new people, do more things, the jar expands. There is now more space around my grief. It is still the same size but my world is bigger. As I continue to grow my world, the size of my loss, the grief, stays the same. But it DOES get easier to move around it.
Eventually, my world has expanded enough for my grief to not be in the way of everything I do all the time. It is not the grief that has shrunk, but my world that has grown. And that is the only way I can work around it, give it the place it deserves and still have a life beyond grief.
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