Finding Peace in Grief: Learning to Let Go Without Forgetting

Dear Jack,
I've gone through so much, every Thursday, the day she died I re-live her death. Would she want me doing that?? It was so sudden and so painful it creeps up into my mind constantly. I want my pain; I don't want to forget it. It will be 9 months this month. It is so hard to force all the negativity away…
 
‘I want my pain I don't want to forget…’ you say.  You do not have to hold onto the pain in order to remember. You can remember with peace and love.  Imagine if you were the one who had to say goodbye, if you were the one who had to leave. What if you knew that every time we thought of you, we felt pain? You would not want that. You would want us to remember the good times and all the things we love about you, not all the ways you brought us pain.  

On the other hand, there are those who resist healing. You wonder why you don’t want to feel better. You don’t understand how you can stay stuck in the rut of your heartache while the vibrant world revolves around you. You believe that if you refuse to allow yourself to heal, that you will somehow be able to keep your loved one closer to you. You get stuck in this place and you do not grow. In the garden of humanity, what is not growing is dying. So it is not a good place to be stuck.  

There was a period of time that Kate couldn't look forward because she kept looking back. She was making the choice to be sad, to feel lost. She was choosing to fill her heart and mind with grief instead of peace. It’s what many people do. Everywhere she looked, she saw me. Every spare thought was me. Every free moment was spent looking for me; longing for me.

The fact is, she had longed for love in childhood and this is why it took so long for her to work through this part of the grief. Because somehow the longing felt “right” to her. It came naturally. She was oddly satisfied by it. It was like an old shoe that she continued to wear because it was all she knew. She also felt that if she continued to grieve, it would keep me closer to her. While it’s true that grief keeps us close, it also keeps us locked in the grief when it’s time to move on and live life again. 
Love, Jack
 
Some of you want to fast forward through the grief process. Some of you do. You rush through the grief and start smiling again. You proudly tell everyone who cares that you are “fine!” But if your love runs deep, you are not fine at all. Sometimes when you least expect it, it will come pouring out of you from out of nowhere. You will have dreams, maybe nightmares. You will experience a minor loss and have a major reaction to it. You will go along in life seemingly okay and then one day, crash! You don’t know what hit you. 

You must go through the grieving process to let go of the feelings that will continue to live inside of you if you do not. It’s all about Letting Go. Letting go of everything. Everything you thought your life would be. Everything you feel. Everything you see. Letting go of your ideas that the world you live in is the real place and that I am in some grand illusion called Heaven. I am in the real place. Let go of everything and realize that you have it all backwards. 

We lived in the moment with you and we live in the moment now and our pain is no more.  Even the memory of pain does not exist where we are. Someday your good memories will replace the unhappy ones. It takes time and for a while you will replay the bad stuff because you are learning to accept things and it is one of the many processes you will go through to get to the other side of the grief.  Hang in there. You'll get there. You will keep going over and over the details until one day the details fade away and all that's left is love. 
 
“The only thing we ever wanted was for you to be happy.”