What is it about New Years that gives us a desire to look back over the past year, reflect and then make New Year resolutions? This is a question that I have pondered over the course of my life. I was never one for goals or resolutions. When someone asks where I’ll be in 5 years, I’m never sure. Maybe it was due to my parents looking for stability and longevity and therefore the desire to be in one place for 5 years was something to achieve. My parents grew up in the great depression. My father fought in World War II. Did they desire to lessen their trauma impact by setting and keeping goals? Maybe it was my fear of failure. If you don’t set a goal, then you don’t fail. I guess it’s really just my stubbornness to not allow society to dictate a day that I need to reflect backwards so I can move forward.
As I consider that statement, reflect backward so I can move forward, I wonder if those of us who grieve don’t always reflect backward because we fear moving forward. I follow many grieving bloggers and Instagramers and a theme I am reading from many people who grieve is the fear of moving forward because we may appear to “forget” the person who has died. So, we grievers often do a little dance with our past and present. I find myself in this conundrum often. I desire to live in the past when my parents and best friend were still in my life. I desire to hear their voice and receive their guidance. I sit with my memories every day. Some days, those memories suck me down into a vortex and I don’t want to leave. It’s like that dream we all have had where a loved one comes back for a visit and you see them so clearly, and then you become aware that it’s a dream and you start to think of ways to hold on for just one more second, and suddenly you are being pulled out of the dream and you are lying awake in your bed trying hard to go back to sleep so the dream will continue. We fight so hard to make it happen. It’s almost as if we can’t deal with another loss that present’s itself in the dream. The other side of it is, staying awake and feeling the memory of the dream. Hearing that voice, or seeing that smile for just a moment, and being thankful and grateful that you had the opportunity to experience it again. That’s the moving forward. In the moving forward, do we feel like we are letting go? Is there a dishonor if we move forward?
There is a woman by the name of Nora McInery that gives a wonderful TED talk (I’ll add her talk to the resources page). She talks about moving forward with grief. I’ll never get over my grief, but what I will be able to do and what I have been doing better at is moving forward. Moving forward for me is starting to look like acknowledgement. The memory is there always inside me, and I smile now when I see my niece or nephew smile like my mom. Or when we talk about family stories and I hear my brother’s sound like my dad. I’m moving forward, but the past is still there.
This past year was a year of growth for me on many levels. 2020 was the year that I decided to no longer allow my fear of what “other’s think” to rule my life. This blog is the perfect example. I needed to do this for my own grief process, but I was so scared of what people would think when they read my blogs. I’m a horrible speller, I change tense’s in my sentence structure and sometimes I ramble on. But this past year, I said to hell with it all. I need to get out of my own head so I can begin to move forward. I don’t know what 2021 will bring. I hope it will continue to bring growth. As long as I’m growing, I’m doing pretty good. This year, I hope to perfect my dance. To find rhythm within the gentle sways, past, present, moving forwarding, but not moving on.
Shes her mother's daughter 