Every loss is different and how you navigate your way through each experience will be different too.
I often feel that life's journeys amounts to what seems like "chapters of goodbyes".
Goodbye to family, goodbye to friends, coworkers, and jobs you may have loved, goodbye to relationships taking with it the hopes, dreams, and plans for the future. It is unavoidable that you will experience one, a few, or even all of these situations at some point through your life journey. Finding a way to cope and heal through your loss experience is important and depending on which loss situation you may be experiencing at the moment, you may feel that you will never be whole again but take it from someone who has experienced all of the aforementioned situations multiple times over...you will recover.
Getting through your sorrow to feel whole again feels impossible while you are in the grips of it, but it will happen once you learn to accept that the landscape of your life has changed. Accepting that fact is a process that looks different for everyone but the important thing is that you stay on the road to healing and continuously progress forward in that journey, however slow or fast is not important it's just important that you are moving through it and not stuck frozen in despair and grief. Depending on the circumstances of your loss, if you feel you are stuck and not coping you may need to seek the help of a professional such as a grief counsellor, or psychologist for techniques to help you come to terms with your loss.
Looking back over time I see all my situations of loss as chapters in my life, some chapters were long and some were short. I suffered multiple miscarriages and a stillborn daughter, and while these chapters were short the loss of these pregnancies and my baby girl was an insurmountable loss that resulted in overwhelming grief that at one point threatened my ability to cope and move through the grieving process. While this chapter was short it took a long time to feel like myself again.
The loss of my birth parents within a year of each other were chapters that held feelings of sorrow and curiosity regarding people that I loved from afar. I was confused about how my story came to be and while they were in my life as I grew up, by the time I was old enough and had put my thoughts together to open up the discussion both were suffering from various illnesses and passed away after some time. The circumstances of their loss included the fact that I had to come to terms with knowing that I would never get the full understanding directly from them about that period of my life. Once I accepted this and came to terms with the reality that those answers were forever lost to me, I was able to move forward through my grief.
The loss of my ex-husband carried with it a level of grief that took me by surprise, I was completely unprepared for the way his death impacted me. The two of us had such a tumultuous relationship and a marriage that ended in deep contention. This friction continued throughout the 14 years that followed, however in the later years we were able to find civil ground in any topic around our 15 year old son. I wondered to myself why was I grieving this man so deeply after all he put me through during and after our relationship and also the marriage had been over for 14 years! Weeks after his passing I was questioning my feelings and even feeling angry with myself for feeling the way I did so I kept telling myself to snap out of it and move on but the grief was not subsiding. I decided I had to stop and take the time to face what I was feeling instead of pushing it away and demanding to myself to "just move on". What I realized was that my grief was not just my own I was also grieving for my son and how the loss of his father would affect him. My son was let down so many times and faced so much disappointment at the hands of his father through the years, he was finally getting to a place where possibly they could build a somewhat meaningful relationship but then he was gone. My heart ached for the fact that my son would not have the opportunity to finally have that father-son relationship he so craved. My heart ached as I wondered how my son would feel when his friends spoke about their fathers on fathers day and the level of sadness that would bring him. I wanted to take the pain away and just bear it all for him. I also realized that my ex-husband was someone that I had known for more than half my life, there are only a handful of people in my life that fit that criteria.
I came to realize that the circumstances around this loss was much different from other losses I experienced and this had to be dealt with differently. I had to seek out assistance from a counselor to help me navigate the complex feelings I was having with this loss. Once I understood that the grief was not just my own but I was also grieving for my son. I could then move on through the feelings of guilt, anger, confusion and most of all overwhelming sadness for what my son would never have.
With each and every loss the grieving process is different but once you have made it through you can often emerge with a renewed sense of meaning which gives you the fuel to move forward in your new reality.
Be kind to yourself and know that the answers don't come in a day or even in a week or a month.
While I have many more losses that I could mention, such as the loss of good friendships, the end of my marriage, and other long-term relationships. There was the death of friends, both my adoptive parents, my godparents, siblings, and coworkers. All of these presented their own individual challenges with the healing and recovery of the loss.
Whether the recovery was long or short they were all just "chapters of goodbyes".
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