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    Honest Grief
    Honest Grief
    Honest Grief
    Ebook194 pages2 hours

    Honest Grief

    By Serenity McLean

    ()

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    About this ebook

    Dealing with loss and grief?
    Discover your path to living with it in peace.

    There are no wrong ways to feel grief. Everybody's grief stew is their own recipe, with their own unique flavours. There are constructive ways of dealing with grief - and some not-so-constructive ways. With this guide, you will discover many practical and helpful things you can do to address the chaos of emotions as well as meaningful ways to express your love for your loved one.

    Finding the courage to authentically deal with your grief in the face of a world that dismisses your loss, seems impossible. Friends disappear. Many are insensitive, judgmental and hurtful. Your pain is so deep you can’t imagine your grief as a transformative opportunity, like the blogs suggest. You find yourself alone and lost in the dark valley of grief. It’s probably the most difficult thing you’ll deal with in life.

    After confronting a parade of losses and repeatedly having to do the hard work of dealing with my grief, Serenity McLean wrote this guide to help others find their way to living with their loss in peace and show how to deal with the unpredicatable emotion. The switch from tumultuous sorrow and pain to the serenity and sweetness of remembering won’t come overnight. But it will come. You will find peace offers the briefest of visits as a casual acquaintance at first, but over time you will form a long-lasting relationship with peace and it will become a constant companion.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherSerenity McLean
    Release dateJan 5, 2018
    ISBN9780995272156
    Honest Grief
    Author

    Serenity McLean

    I’ve raced in a corvette with the needle buried. Not a pilot, but flown a piper aircraft. Been attacked by machete-wielding natives hunting for heads. Swam with an alligator. Hightailed it in a sailboat racing a monster storm threatening to capsize. And found myself face to face with a growling lynx.Love living the adventure.Serenity McLean, Adventurer and Author

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      Book preview

      Honest Grief - Serenity McLean

      Fellow traveller, let me share my story of massing losses. I won’t go into great detail, but just enough that you can understand where this guide comes from.

      Loss one: my job. It started with being packaged out. I worked for an oil and gas service company in an oil and gas town. When the price of oil plummeted, anyone whose job depended on capital spending was packaged out.

      Loss two: one dog. Three days later I had to put down one of my beloved dogs due to cancer.

      The area I lived in was economically depressed because of the oil prices and work would be hard to find in my area of expertise. In rising up from these first two losses, I made a decision to change the direction of my career. It would take quite a bit of time for my idea to take off, but everything else in my life was good. I had a very peaceful home and an extremely happy life with my chosen life companion (my mom) and our two dogs. And together we were financially okay. I had hope and resiliency back then.

      Loss three: my mom’s health. A year later we got the news Mom had terminal cancer. I rose up again from that loss and, while it was difficult and very draining to watch life ebb out of her every day for a year, I was grateful to be home to care for her, and would not do anything differently.

      Loss four: another dog. Three months into that last year with my mom, I had to put down a second dog, this time with cancer in her head cutting off her breathing. Knocked down again. Standing up again and carrying on was a bit slower and harder. I began again at the start of the grief road.

      Loss five: Mom. She was failing and mid-December we agreed she would go into a hospice. On Christmas Eve, late in the evening and alone, she died. Although I knew this was inevitable, it was devastating. My heart ripped to shreds. So much that was good in my life disappeared with her death. Afterward I felt I sat at death’s portal for a long time, wishing I could find a way through that door to the other side where Mom and I would be together again. It took a lot of courage to stand up and walk on. I was drained from the year of letting go of Mom, yet I began again at the start of grief, this time with massive storms of anguish and sorrow.

      Loss six: my home. There were no jobs and I couldn’t afford to keep my house. I had to sell much of what I owned to move back east to where there was work. There was no choice. While reeling from my mom’s death, I didn’t have time to grieve. I got busy and cleaned out her belongings and sold our home. I walked away from the place we shared for over a decade – that place of peace and joy was gone from my life, that place where she sang, I love you a bushel and a peck, to me from the top of the staircase. I did what had to be done. No time for grieving.

      Losses seven and eight: a job and health. During my last couple of weeks in our home, I managed to line up a job and once back east I was going to meet the executives for a final decision. I found out later I was their only candidate. What I didn’t realize is that during this time I had a spontaneous subdural hematoma (for no reason, blood vessels began to bleed in my head, and blood pooled against my brain causing massive headaches which I thought was just due to tension). When I arrived at where I was temporarily staying, I finally went to a doctor and discovered how serious these headaches were. Since they were talking surgery, and my head was a total fog, I had to inform the company I couldn’t take the job.

      Three months later and the blood still had not dissolved. It continued to hurt with any kind of pressure and my thinking remained foggy. I was unable to deal with writing and words. I don’t remember much of these days. Dealing with my grief was impossible.

      Six months later it was slowly healing, so the doctor decided against surgery, but recovery was very slow as I could expect it to take up to a year to get my brain function back again once all the blood finally dissolved. This meant I was unable to get a job.

      After losses in every area of my life, I found myself sitting on the ash heap that once was a happy life. There was no avenue out – no ability to work, and no white knight in shining amour riding in to pick me out of this mess. It was day after day living in the ruins of my life. I had one thing left – my sweet dog Abbey.

      Loss nine: Yes, Abbey. Before the end of that first year after Mom’s death, my last dog was diagnosed with a brain tumour. She was the only living being in my life. With so much missing, she became the only place for all my love that swirled about and had no place to land. I didn’t know if I wanted to stand up again or even could. What was the point? Another loss would just come along and knock me down again. The grief stew seemed bigger than I could take on. This was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back. It wasn’t that one dog’s death was huge – it was that the pile of loss was unbearable.

      And yet the sun continues to rise, and we are left with no choice but to deal with it. For me, a big source of feeling helpless and hopeless came from the continuing losses that seemed to visit regularly – just when I seemed to be getting on my feet again.

      Yes, everybody experiences loss. But I started to feel like Job. I was stunned at the storm that blew into my life then stood in the midst spinning out continued destruction. I called it the loss parade and saw no end to its continued march of devastation – just like the parade of people that came to Job to tell him of more devastation. Not everybody experiences loss upon loss upon loss until it seems too much to bear. But some of us do.

      Yes, I know about loss, and I know about how hard the grief road is, especially when you have to start over and over again with an ever-increasing load. I know what it feels like to be knocked over so many times that you just don’t want to bother getting up again. All the emotions in this guide I’ve dealt with over and over again. I know the pain of others kicking you when you’re down, often in the name of Christ. I know months upon months of hopelessness. I know the taste of bitterness and pessimism. I know the abysmal loneliness of this dark valley. And I know the hollow emptiness inside. I bring this guide to you from someone who knows the difficulty of finding your way to serenity after loss.

      ~Serenity

      Update: After a couple of months of praying Abbey wouldn’t die, she suddenly improved. She is a normal happy golden retriever as of the writing of this book. I attribute it to God’s intervention. This was the first ray of hope after a very long line of losses. It is evidence that loss does not go on forever.

      Honest Grief

      The word honest can be defined as a free, forthright expression. Many folks facing grief don’t feel free to fully express their grief in their own way. Onlookers push their expectations on the griever, telling them how and how not to grieve. They will dismiss your feelings, correct your thinking, judge your actions, and tell you when you should be finished grieving. It takes courage and strength to establish and guard the needed time and space to fully work through all the tumult of grief in an authentic meaningful way.

      The word grief comes from the French word grève, meaning heavy burden. Indeed, it can be a heavy burden. It’s what we experience when we deal with loss. This can include the death of a loved one, end of a relationship or marriage, loss of health, loss of a job, death of a pet, loss of financial stability, miscarriage, retirement, loss of a lifelong dream, selling the family home, loss of a friendship, loss of safety following a trauma. For some, one loss ripples out to others and you watch your life collapse like dominoes. You’re left standing among the ruins.

      Onlookers often think grief is a sadness associated with a loss in the present, but you look ahead and all you see is barrenness in all your tomorrows. You are grieving not just for what is gone today, but also what is gone from your future, from every single day for the rest of your life.

      In Honest Grief I will refer to the loss of a loved one, but loss is loss. Feel free to replace the words loved one with something that describes what you grieve for.

      Probably what you find most surprising is that your grief, even in the early days, doesn’t conform to the expected five stages of grief. Instead it’s a chaotic maelstrom – you bounce from one emotion to the next. There is no warning of shifting emotions. And there’s even less control.

      In the depths of grief you deal with a multitude of emotions, from shock, numbness and disbelief to anguish, remorse and longing, and many feelings in-between. While grief is a complex mix of emotions, it also affects your mental and physical person. You might feel foggy in your thinking, slow to process, forgetful, indecisive, unmotivated, unable to think of anything but your loss and memories of your loved one, disinterest in life and the living, and perhaps a lack of trust in yourself and others. Physically you may feel exhausted, sick to your stomach, ache all over, suffer with headaches or migraines, a lack of appetite, a physical pain in your heart, insomnia or sleeping too much, nightmares, clumsiness, and a lowered immunity to

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