By far and away the most common thing I’ve been thinking of since we’ve lost Mum, is time’s now separated into the time we had her here with us, and the time since. No matter what I do, this is the predominant thought pattern. I’m at peace with it, mainly because I’m intrigued about the whole process of bargaining within grief, as an invitation to remembrance and letting go.
If you were to give me one wish,
I’d have Mum back in a flash.
Just being truthful . . .
That’s the most stinging reality in loss; the one thing you want, you cannot have. If I couldn’t have that one wish, and you gave me another, I’d want to step back in time to a time when Mum was alive, and maybe to a time when she and I were much younger. I’d step back into that time even for five minutes. Just to lap it up in my senses.
But of course the very presence of these wishes indicates a heart of bargaining, of wanting that which one cannot have.
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Bargaining is integral to the loss process, because without loss we wouldn’t even be cognisant of bargaining on something we can’t have. Without loss there would be no looking back and pining for what was and can never be again.
But there is a strange and bizarre peace that I am enjoying in this grief of having lost Mum. I see it as a positive sign being the student of grief I am. I see it as something to be learned from, something to be embraced, something to inspire healing and indeed growth.
What I do possess in my memory’s eye is the capacity to re-paint pictures that have long faded. I don’t know if it’s just me, it could well be the case, but the more intently I invest my consciousness in reclaiming a memory long ago — and there are so many of them! — the more I can fill the gaps simply by knowing the shapes in the image of that bygone era.
I have such strong memories of Mum, of her laugh on the phone (we used to laugh almost every day together in the last two years), of the look she would give me when we hugged, of her cheeky smile, of her perspective and wisdom. But of course I’ve also got memories of Mum from when I was much younger. I think back to times when Mum had to reinforce boundaries and put her foot down. She never stopped loving any of us at any time.
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I think this is why I’m at peace with the bargaining process. I understand that life has changed, but I also think that loss is such a necessary wakeup call.
People lose their parents or their children or their marriages and we don’t bat an eyelid until it happens to us. Then suddenly, in the blink of an eye, we’re connected to a club we previously had no inkling of. Suddenly, we are connected to people who have been through the same ordeal.
In an instant, we feel understood,
because as they say,
birds of a feather flock together.
Simply acknowledging the bargaining process is central to grief, we begin to acknowledge its presence as something that’s unavoidable, and therefore nothing to be resisted.
Even as bargaining is the constant thought on the mind, the gift within it is our loved one is remembered and will NEVER be forgotten. More is our actual fear that we will one-day forget our loved one who has passed away. It’s such a reprehensible thought.
It will never happen, and at least while we bargain for a wish beyond reality, what we cannot have is also a reminder of what we will never lose — our cherished memory of our loved one or the situation before loss took them or our dreams away. And yet, before we lost them, we had no idea how final and polarising grief would be.
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To a choice between remembrance or of letting go, I’d say go both! There’s peace in both locales of spirit. In constantly remembering, even as we bargain to have them back, our lost loved one or situation is never forgotten. And neither are they forgotten when we let go. Indeed both these situations loan to us peace for the very fact that we can merge them.
Even as we remember them,
we let them go,
thankful we had them in the first place.
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