1 pm on Saturday and here's what I've done today; baked raspberry pecan muffins, made a grainbake for Korky, talked to a new Friend on FB, watered the plants, read a bunch of Tolkien. I watched a couple of Cottagecore videos on youtube and started going through a drawer in my personal room, that holds some art I want framed, a few books I meant to read at some point, an offering plate I forgot I had, and the whole, entire OBOD course. It's that last one I am digging into. Right now wouldn't have seemed like a great time for deep spiritual work, other than related to grieving, but turns out, actually, it is. Despite my grief - because of my grief....I'm once again working the Bardic grade. I know this is right, because, well, I learned it from Megan Devine.
Backtrack; looking over this blog I counted 7 entries since Danny died, that I started and didn't post because they were just too personal. This might seem odd given the personal nature of what I have actually shared, but honestly my rants about self reproach and how I wish I'd bought more Littles and so on are the tip of the iceberg. I have been mired in all the things I did wrong or failed to do - and while this seems to be a pretty standard pattern for those of us in deep grief, that doesn't help much. It's still horrible and it doesn't really do me any good to write it all out here, and then move right on to the next bout of anger at myself.
Dwelling on regrets is adding to my suffering, not supporting me through my pain.
So I think I will just start to share some Danny things here, memories, - celebrations of his cuteness, his "Littleness" and stories that I cherish, while I work through the anguish aspects with my books and journal. The Devine book is proving to be most helpful; I LOVE her repeated assurance that the searing pain of grief is not a pathology to be fixed, but a natural state to be lived through. The suffering we add onto that pain can and should be minimized; she has us start to learn our patterns and how to differentiate the inescapable pain from the avoidable suffering, by writing down the things that help us cope and the things that hurt more (I am on day one of this exercise; as of yesterday here is the Exercise fastened to my fridge. Today I added Tolkien and OBOD and muffins to things that help, if only by offering distraction.)
Nothing up there yesterday. :)
The reality of grief is this:
"Grief tears apart the world one has known. Its powerful winds careen through the self like a tornado, shaking it to pieces. The wild thing that true, deep grief is, cannot be tamed by touch or walled off by words.We become experiencers of grief, expeditionaries of ending, explorers of loss, engaged witnesses who must– if we are to travel through the territory and find the other side – let grief have its way with us. And grief . . . it is pervasive and insistent and relentless. When it finds us, it enters every part of the self, every aspect of our lives. It fills up the senses. The life that existed before,carefully built throughout the years, shatters into a thousand sharp fragments. We then live in the ruins that loss has made of us, and we grieve. Every day, we grieve."
Stephen Harrod Buhner
Yes, indeed.
So I start out now, looking for ways to support myself through this pain and looking to identify things I do that pour salt in the gaping wound that is Danny's absence. And I find that sharing stories and images of sweet remembrance is a better thing for me than rehashing how I worked too much, how I canceled the Barkbox (he had lost all interest and the treats are awful) and I was just not 100% perfect at all times.
I loved him with all my heart and that never wavered.
Here are some treasured images of Danny trying to comfort my darling Lila as she lay dying. Lila never took to Dan, never stopped mourning Luke, but that didn't bother Danny. He was a little Being of Love from the very start, and eventually, in her last days of life, Lila drew some comfort from him.
More sweet images and memories to follow. He was my everything.
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