Tuesday's Trust - Telling Our Story: Our Truth versus Their Denial

Tuesday's Trust

Telling Our Story: 

Our Truth versus Their Denial

How is it we face Death's reality

When others march illusively along,

And yet when we face our mortality,

By admitting our weakness, we are strong?

In a single blow, Death shattered our illusions,

For we abruptly learned a child could die,

But others still cling to their delusions

And beg us ~ by their denial ~ to lie:

"Tell us you've not been thrown in Hell's pit,

Daily grieving the loss of your child;

Buck up! Cheer up! For I cannot bear it!

Your broken heart makes me see Satan's wiles…

It unleashes upon me some hell on earth

To see a mother can be parted from her child

When with empty arms, she questions her worth

And cannot function in this world for such a long while."

But we ~ we who by Death have been vilely robbed…

Cling to our truth ~ "Yes! Our child has died,

Wrenching our hearts till we sob and sob.

 Our LOVE is too large to succumb to your lie;

We can no longer 'play pretend'

When life as we knew it has come to an end!"

And yet I observe a transformation

As we daily face the Truth that stopped our life:

Our tears call down Comfort ~God's restoration~

Love carries us in our grief as with Death we strive.

Love embraces the love in this mother's heart;

His tears with mine start to co-mingle.

For love of my child, He did His own part:

He gave up His child, His single Son

Which unleashed enough of His tears to fill the River of Life

Empowering His Child and mine to end death's strife,

Both restored to His arms to live their everlasting life!

Embracing such Truth sets this mother free

Despite the fact that I still shed many-a-tear;

Love's comfort empow'rs me to live my life here,

While Love's death paved a way for my child and me

To live together with Love for all eternity!

Picture, thanks to Grieving Mother, K.G.
Poem - Telling Our Story: Our Truth versus Their Denial - Angie Bennett Prince - 5/28/2012

Thusday's Therapy Violent Death: Restorative Re-Telling Part Two

Thusday's Therapy

Violent Death: Restorative Re-Telling

Part Two

My story of her dying began with a wailing protest. In those early moments, I could not allow her dying to be happening.

~Edward K. Rynearson

How do you process the unacceptable? How do you process the death of your child? Accept the unacceptable? Live within Death? Accept the Death of the one to whom you gave Life? How can that be done? And yet it is "healthy" to "accept" the death of your child? Well, then how do you "accept" the unacceptable? We will look at some of the process...

Let's back up a minute....

We have talked about the neurophysiological aspects of grief's trauma being lodged in, or stuck in. our brain's cerebellum, and how the brain basically has to be "re-wired" to help complicated grief's trauma travel into the other parts of the brain to be effectively reprocessed.

We have talked about how right-brain activities help to reach that trauma through a "back-door" to the traumatized brain as the "front door" has been bolted shut. For example,

Journaling what happened just after Merry Katherine was killed was not working for me. I was too traumatized, and such writing was too graphic, so just writing the horrid facts was actually re-traumatizing me.

So the Lord laid it on my heart to write poetry, which, (looking back on it) was essentially an endeavor that uses both the left brain AND the right brain...which we now know is an essential factor for healing trauma...

And we have talked about the importance of learning to "float" amidst death's "riptide" that abruptly devastates our lives. Continually "fighting" the riptide becomes unproductive and thus an ineffective way to survive trauma. "Floating" is a way to allow oneself to have reprieves from grief when necessary to process more effectively the violent horror that has been thrown into our lives.

So how do we begin the grief process of the "Restorative Retelling" of the violent death of our child...

Giving Myself a Voice Amidst Her Death

To keep death from defining you and therefore staying "stuck" in the trauma of your child's death, you must reprocess the death in a way that defines who you are in relationship to the death.

When I had to first speak Merry Katherine's death to loved ones who did not yet know of her death, that moment was when her death first became real to me.

Before that, her death was concept—I could not conceive of her not being here—yet speaking, telling my sister for the first time, made it "real" to me, and at that point all of the sorrow began to flow...

I was not a part of Merry Katherine's actual dying, yet her death "happened" to me--therefore, I am now a part of the story, so her story will become my story in that it will be told from my perspective.

So I must formulate "my" story, or I will stay stuck in the trauma of death's horrid ending to her precious life.

Similar to Rynearson's "wailing protest" in the early moments of being told of his wife's death as he "could not allow her dying to be happening," early on I too "heard" myself talking to Merry Katherine with protests soon after I was told of her death:

"I knew this would happen!"

"I couldn't get through to you!"

"Why couldn't you hear me?!"

~almost a still begging of her to listen to my warnings so that her death wouldn't have had to happen, and if she could just hear me, she could be alive, and all would be okay again.

I remember when God led me to journal within the first month after her death, I wrote, in effect,

I do not want to write this because I do not want it to be "real."

Yet telling the story of her death is what began to make it real for me so that I could begin to process through it. Like-it-or-not, it was here and it was real, so I had to feel it, and walk it through with God's help, one-minute-at-a-time.

How does Rynearson approach a restorative direction in telling and retelling his story?

I cannot change the ending of her story. The best I can hope for is that I change myself as I retell it. The realization that I need to find a role for myself in her dying story has been the key to restoring myself.

That insight changes my perspective from helpless witness to include who I was before--a husband and friend who did all I could do to help her. This is not the sort of change that magically erases or reverses what happened. The terror and incoherence of Julie's dying isn't dispelled. I will always feel that.

It is in this realignment of myself, from "her dying" to "our living," that allows a restorative direction to my retelling.

So how does my telling and retelling the story become restorative for me?

Continuing to tell the story ultimately helps me to process it and weave it into the fabric of my current life.

And as I tell and retell the story, I begin to conceive what this "new" life will be like —not living without her— but living with her as she is now, in spirit, made new, made whole.

Excerpts are from the book, Retelling Violent Death by Dr. Edward K. Rynerson, pp. xii - xiv

Thursday's Therapy - Writing Sometimes Helps

Thursday's Therapy

Writing Sometimes Helps

from

A TCF Speech – 8 Things I’ve Learned About the Grief of a Grieving Parent

Part Four of Eight

Sunday, July 6, 2003 - TCF National Conference Closing Speech by Charlie Walton

Part Four

4. WRITING SOMETIMES HELPS

Number four... writing sometimes helps. I have been amazed through the years that people who, way back in elementary school, were traumatized by some English teacher with a merciless red grading pencil, traumatized into thinking that they could never write anything, will suddenly produce beautiful poems and other written sentiments in the process of remembering their children.

There is something therapeutic about putting things on paper, reading them over, changing a word here, adjusting an emphasis there, that really helps to focus the mind and get some of those inner feelings out where we can deal with them more effectively.

It works by the same principle as making a list when you've got more to do than you can hold in your mind. You know, when you think you have a hundred things to do, and then you put that list down on paper, and suddenly realized that you really only had seven things to do. It's just that they were swirling around in your head so fast that seven things looked like a hundred things.

So, consider writing down your feelings if you haven't already.

Don't worry about phrasing things for others to read. You don't need to start out shooting for publication. Just put some words on paper that work for you, words that feel good when you read them over to yourself. Later, if your words help others when they are shared, that's good too. But, for starters, just dump some of what's in your mind onto paper. Read it over, work it over, bathe it in tears until it feels good.

Writing doesn't necessarily work for everybody, but maybe pulling things out of your weary mind and onto a defenseless piece of paper can work for you.

************

More quotes regarding the helpfulness of writing amidst your grief:

"The mind-shift between pain and possibility depends on your willingness to feel, to become vulnerable."

Rico believes this is done

"by focusing on whatever you are feeling here and now, this very moment, and giving it your words on a page."

Telling a story about these feelings takes the process one step further and allows even more healing to take place.

~Gabriele Rico, Pain and Possibility

One must tell it slowly and carefully; how his son fell ill, how he suffered, what he said before he died, how he died. One must describe every detail of the funeral, and the journey to the hospital to fetch the defunct’s clothes. His daughter Anissia remained in the village—one must talk about her too. Was it nothing he had to tell? Surely the listener would gasp and sigh, and sympathize with him?

~Anton Chekhov

******

And from www.oneyearofwritingandhealing.com comes the following inspirational saga of how one mother grappled with her deep grief:

One particular article that caught my attention is one entitled “Healing Power of the Pen” …a moving article by a woman, Alice J. Wisler, written four years after the death of her four-year-old son, Daniel.

The first year after the death of a child is like having the worst noise possible running through your head each day and night. There is no way to turn the horrendous sounds off because there is no off button. I wrote through that noise. . .

She writes of carrying her journal to a particular spot beneath weeping willows at a local park and writing there. She did this, she says, over the course of many months, and she observes, with the benefit of hindsight, how her writing moved along a progression

similar to that of many of the psalms:

“starting with anger and agony and, gradually, ending with hope.”

She writes of how writing can begin the process of transforming devastation:

We enter into our devastation, get a good grip on what our struggles are and something about seeing them on paper causes us to realize the pain is not only within us anymore. It is shared, even if only on a sheet of notebook paper.

It is documented and the more we write, the better we are able to understand and deal with our intense sorrow.

Ms. Wisler offers such a deeply felt and hard-earned template of what is possible:

Moving from the inarticulate—the worst noise possible—those horrendous sounds inside her head with no off button—to the articulate. Moving from noise to words.

Moving, over the course of many months—and perhaps years—from a place of devastation to a place where she is able to understand and deal with intense sorrow.

Perhaps what grief requires, as much as anything, is that the process not be interrupted. That it find a time and a place in which to unfold--with a companion (when possible) and without (too much) interruption.

And, perhaps, at least for some of us, writing can play a role in this process.

******

Thank you to D. Morrow of http:// bit.ly/6VCdeb of www.oneyearofwritingandhealing.com

Thursday's Therapy - Telling Your Story

Thursday's Therapy

Telling Your Story

from

A TCF Speech – 8 Things I’ve Learned About the Grief of a Grieving Parent

Part Three of Eight

Jayne Raines Newton of The Atlanta Compassionate Friends mailed me this wonderfully therapeutic speech two weeks ago, and I'd like to pass it along to you!

Sunday, July 6, 2003 - TCF National Conference

Conference Closing Speech by Charlie Walton

Part Three

3. TELLING YOUR STORY

A third thing I have learned over the years is that grieving people need to tell their stories more times than their friends or family members are going to be willing to hear those stories.

That is perhaps the greatest value of The Compassionate Friends, a group of people who are not only willing to hear your story again and again but will sincerely cry with you the twentieth time you tell that story just as they cried the first time you told it.

These are people who understand, people who listen intently, people who will even help you tell your story. I don't know if you have noticed it but, if you are sitting in a circle telling what happened to you, those who have heard the story lots of times will actually jump in and add a detail you might be leaving out. If there is a first-timer in the circle, the veterans may add explanations and clarifications for them.

It has become their story too. They have suffered your loss. They repeatedly provide the exact response you expected from the whole world. Do you remember your outrage at the world for continuing as though nothing had happened? Do you remember the urge to scream,

"How can you go on like this? Don't you realize that my world has ended?"

So, I praise The Compassionate Friends. a group that meets a vital and normal need, the need for someone to listen with sincere interest as we tell and re-tell our stories again and again.

On the other hand, knowing that we need to tell our stories so many times should help us be a little more understanding toward friends and relatives who are reluctant to hear our stories again and again.

They don't know that each re-telling is helping to heal.

They don't know that each re-telling is therapy.

All they know is that you keep repeating things that make them hurt and they worry that you might be stuck in that story forever.

People who have not been where you have been have no concept of how long grief takes.

They think it should end in some "respectably short time" after the funeral.

Kay and I still have some understanding, supportive friends who will come to us as December 15th approaches and say,

"I remember that it was about this time of year that Tim and Don died, and I want you to know that I am praying for your comfort, and I want you to know that those two guys are very much remembered and missed."

These are wonderful friends who have learned... sometimes with a little training from us... that

"Grief takes longer than one year."

Thank you again to Charlie Walton, and to Jayne Raines Newton who shared this speech with me, both of The Atlanta Compassionate Friends.

Stay tuned next week for Point Four of Charlie's speech!