This is a post I have been planning for ages and I kept coming back to it but always felt too raw. After losing my mom I bought several books on grief. Sadly, almost none of them helped. One of the books I read after losing my mom was CS Lewis’s A Grief observed. He wrote it after losing his wife. I started it about a month after her passing. For me, it was the book that most closely resonates with how I was feeling at the time. He understood that when you lose someone, all thoughts and feelings that exist for them has no where to go. All the roads that lead to them are now closed. Reading him was the only time I felt understood. About half way through though he started to get ahead of me in the process. It was too painful for me because I wan’t anywhere close to where he was so I stopped reading. I tried again a few months later and it was still a no go. I was so angry that couldn’t get there. I was mad at him. how could he feel better in what seemed like a page. I picked it back up again after a period of time and I am glad I did. I was reminded of it this past weekend when discussing it with a dear friend. There is a passage about “getting over it” where he compares it to people having surgery. To paraphrase, “getting over it after having surgery for appendicitis and having a leg removed are two very different things. The amputee is left with a stump and will either heal or he will die. If he heals the pain will stop , and he will regain strength use his wooden leg, he will have “got over it”. However, he may have some recurrent pain for life, and he will always be reminded that he has one leg. His whole life is changed, activities and pleasures change, some even stop. He will never be a biped again.
This is such a great way of putting it. I am learning to live this new legless life. A friend of mine said to me soon after ” You never get over it” He was right and it was probably the best advice I received. It’s always there, sitting next to me, but it’s not the enemy. It just is. Do I “feel better”? Yes. I feel lighter and that’s a good thing. Baby steps.