Marker Stones Part II - Confrontation - ‘Entering the Depths’
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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©
From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller
It’s in this second of the grief cycles that the waters of emotion get deeper and run heavy with the hidden currents of your pain – but again there are marker stones within this part of your experience to help you understand this part of your journey and know it will eventually lead you to your healing.
The hard simple truth is that you have to endure the journey – but enduring it is so much less difficult if you understand what it is that you’re enduring.
These are the marker stones of this middle phase of your grief cycles in ‘Confrontation -Entering the Depths:
- Very intense grief
- Despair and yearning
- Volatile emotional extremes
- Depression symptoms
- Anger and guilt
- Acute waves of grief
- Often repeating a review of the loss experience
This is the time of learning to adjust to your loss, of ups and downs, of good days and days not so good at all as you learn to deal with the grief which is understandably the central focus of your life at this point in time.
You’re struggling to come to terms with your loss and the meanings contained within it. You’ll find yourself mentally and emotionally reviewing your relationship with the one who died and likely dealing with feelings of guilt or regret which can surface at this time.
Your responses to your loss are likely to include the full range of emotions from anger and depression to crushing loneliness – and the sheer intensity of these feelings may surprise and overwhelm you at times as your beliefs, values and even faith are being challenged by the ways in which your whole world has suddenly changed around you.
It’s crucial to your healing that you find safe ways to sort through and express your feelings during this cycle of grief – by activities such as writing out your feelings, talking to somebody you trust, working on a memorial project and making sure to look after yourself and your own needs.
The physical pain you’re experiencing during this cycle is as real as it gets – it’s not imagined or of no significance – it’s your body reacting to the strength and force of your overwhelming emotions. The heartache you feel is real and chest pain is common among people suffering from loss, grief and bereavement. You’ll notice your usual patterns of eating and sleeping have likely changed too.
Other things around you seem to be changing as well – often including your social support network of people you’ve relied on before this death happened in your life. Some of them will expect you to feel better sooner than you actually do, and you’re more likely to find the comfort and support you really need among other bereaved folks like yourself – they understand your experience so much better because they’ve been there before you.
The most important thing you need to do during this middle cycle of grief is to allow yourself to experience the pain of your loss and start to integrate the reality of that loss into your new life of recovery and healing.
As you search and experience your way through this phase pay attention to the marker stones of the journey, and allow yourself to accept that they really are part of the path you must travel through your loss, grief and bereavement to find the new health of healing that awaits you down the road.
Article author
About the Author
For almost forty years of his life Ken Matthies has been a writer and chronicler of life expressed in poetic form, following the family tradition laid down by his grandfather before him.
Faced with the dramatically life altering experience of his helicopter pilot daughter’s sudden death in 2002 he has grown to also become a literary author of true events based on his own life. Though grief opened his literary doors it is the Light of Love and Memories supplying the fuel of inspiration to write through them.
As a second-chance dad given the opportunity to verbally share his life stories with his newly rediscovered daughter it was she who told him that she believed him to be a ‘worthy man’ after having heard them, and who encouraged him that they should be shared in written form beyond her own life – not yet knowing as she said it that she was soon to leave him behind. As a bereaved father and writer learning how to live life again in the Light of his own Love and Memories of his daughter, he writes those stories now as a testament to her belief and faith in their value.
His full length book entitled "How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light" was the first of these stories which he wrote in the Light of those Love and Memories.
He lives in the solitude and grandeur of a tiny southern Yukon village with his Tlingit native wife Skoehoeteen and the successor to their venerable old Tahltan bear dog Clancy Underfoot, who now happily awaits them at the Rainbow Bridge in Doggy Heaven. She’s a new female puppy named Hlinukts Seew which means ‘Sweet Rain’ in the Tlingit language, a wonderful phonetic variation in memory of Clancy’s name who was also called C.U. for short. It’s a good place to tell those stories from.
You can read more of Ken's writings and find his Amazon Kindle book at www.kenmatthies.com.
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