Thoughts on Mourning…

Letting go is painful but necessary. It may be one of the most passionate experiences of your life. Emotions are our first response when we care, when we love.

Losing something or someone we love causes powerful feelings. So, when we mourn, we honor the enormity of our loss with matching agony. We resist the loss mightily. We usually feel angry and resistant to something we would have prevented. We feel pain, fear and, often guilt, about what we deem our part in the loss.

Feeling this chaotic mixture of emotions is exhausting as it courses through us. The work of riding the waves of mourning takes time, tears and degrees of privacy. It costs and it is the honorable ritual of losing someone or something we deem precious.

-Heather Carlile

Heather’s Video on You Tube

Our Natural Responses to Loss

You Know You’re Grieving When:

Symptoms: When you are mourning or grieving a loss, it is normal to be:

1. Forgetful – you are using more of your right brain abilities so the logical and memory abilities can be secondary.
2. Exhausted – emotional intensity and unusual responsibilities drain energy.
3. Confused – when you are experiencing the deep emotions of grief, you are feeling more than thinking.
4. Hallucinate – especially following a death you may see non-physical images. This may be just a manifestation of the searching and yearning for the person who is gone.
5. Anger and Relief – Don’t feel guilty about feeling anger or relief at times. Both are normal reactions. But be sure you share those feelings only with people who will understand and not judge you for having them.
6. Have difficulty concentrating and making decisions or a short attention span.
7. Are absent-minded or forgetful.
8. Are irritable – easily angered – bothered by little things.
9. Experience shortness of breath, tightness in throat, heaviness in chest.
10. Have difficulty sleeping or sometimes sleep more than usual.
11. Feel distant, separate or different from others, like “observing from afar.”
12. Feel alone no matter how many people are present.
13. Feel lost, without direction or adrift.
14. Cry at unexpected times and often over seemingly unrelated things.
15. Find yourself working abnormally long hours.
16. Sometimes feel like you have no energy and don’t want to do anything.
17. Are angry or critical towards family or friends over things said or not said.
18. Have little or no interest in things you used to enjoy.
19. Review your past and friendships/opportunities lost.
20. Feel old or worthless and of no value to others.
21. Find most conversations boring, superficial or trivial.
22. Feel that listening to others complain is sometimes too much to handle.
23. Want to change career or job, residence, friends, spouse, etc. (Not wise now.)
24. Replay over and over what happened – who said what – who did what.
25. It is normal to have fleeting thoughts of giving up or even of suicide. Just let those thoughts float on through. However, if they become prolonged or pervasive…SEEK HELP.