The new normal

There were a lot of tears shed today. Between the eight of us, a lot of tears have been shed throughout each of our lives, a lot of pain and longing and loss have been undergone... And no doubt more is to come. For how else can grief and pain be dealt with other than going through it and facing it full on? There is no way about it. Sometimes to feel better you must feel worse. Sometimes to appreciate and experience real joy and letting go, one must remember and remind yourself what you have gone through and why it hurts so...

One lost a mother, merely days before mine... One lost a long term companion... One lost a series of loved one, and did not really grief until the latest loss of her father... Another lost her husband of fifty-seven years... Imagine all that pain, imagine the severity of the longing and grief put together! Imagine how all these wry individual, and yet shared, experiences have affected us all...

The feelings described by all of us were so strikingly common. Though the relationships between our loved ones are invariably different, though our pain and grief, including their depths and lengths, vary, there are similarities. Feelings of emptiness, loss, feelings of being lost, feelings of nobody being able to understand you and feelings of frustration that even friends after a while become dismissive and see you as a freak or a nutcase. Everything takes so much effort, everything can suddenly break you down
And leave you howling and crying. Anything can be a reminder, trigger an emotion, a memory, a flood of tears.

But in sharing our stories we know we are not alone, we know we are not crazy and that we've not lost it as people seem to think we have. It is all perfectly normal. Perhaps not the "normal" strong and confident and coherent self we used to e or we used to know. But we are working towards establishing and accepting a "new normal". How can a deep experience of loss and deep grief not change someone? How can the exhausting and very traumatic experience of caregiving and seeing your loved one deteriorate not affect you? How can people except you to be the same old self and criticize or judge you when you are feeling down and not performing or functioning like before? There is a new normal we need to find, a new normal we need to adapt to, and others must leave to be there to support and accept you as you are.