Walking through wet grass!

After my moan of last time I decided I wanted some tips on how to be less stressed and relax more. So I looked on the internet and came across some ideas to help de-stress. They were not every day things or long term things, but I just thought they were nice. There were loads of them, but here are a few that I thought ‘yep – that would be nice right now!’:

Walk barefoot in wet grass – has anyone ever done that?!! I used to on a warm summer night at the house I grew up in, just as it got dark and the grass was beginning to get dewy. So relaxing and invigorating – I wonder why?

Watch the sunset – Always special, especially when the scenery around is beautiful too and it’s nice and warm.

Have a picnic – I really fancy one right now. I’d like to dress up in a pretty dress and go to a field full of long grass and wild flowers and eat salmon sandwiches and cake!!!!

Swim when it’s raining – I’ve done this before in the sea at Cornwall and it’s so refreshing.

Get up early and watch the sunrise – I’ve often wanted to do this, just need to learn to drag myself out of bed one nice summer morning. It would be really nice to go somewhere beautiful and read the Bible as the sun rises. I always think that would be such a great spiritual time.
Go and watch 2 movies in one day and have a pizza and some wine in between the two – Sounds great to me!!!

Trouble is, most of them would only really work in the summer, but imagining some of these things really brings back some lovely memories and I can almost smell the summer! I can particularly imagine the one about walking through wet grass with bare feet. It reminds me of many a summer night where the weather was nice and warm and I’d love to be in Dad’s garden. It smelt so fresh with all the flowers that he grew! And sometimes we’d have the fountain going in the pond and the smells and the sounds in the dusk were all such a wonderful way to relax and be content. I hope this summer we all still feel able to do that and that although it might be sad, it will bring back some wonderful memories for us.

Memories are such funny things – they can give the most wonderful warm feelings inside and bring a smile to the face, while at the same time bringing feelings of pain, especially if they are memories you can never re-live. However, I can cope with crying at memories when they are such wonderful ones. So now I’m just waiting for the summer to roll on!!

Waves of grief

Time is going on and it’s now 4 months since Dad died. In some ways it feels much longer than that – the feeling of normality seems like something from the dim and distant past – but in many ways it seems to have flown by. Conversations about Dad have lessened and people don’t ask about it all so much anymore – life is well and truly going on but I just feel like, ‘Hang on! My Dad has died, surely no one has come to terms with it yet, surely everyone still feels confused and bewildered about it all like me?!?!’.

But I guess people do still feel like I do, and I guess in reality I too am getting on with normal life just as much as anyone else is. But I am learning that grief comes and goes in waves, and as much as there have been times where I feel like I have dealt with the confusion and the other feelings I struggle with, I am fast discovering that I definitely haven’t worked through them.

At the start, I just couldn’t get my head around what had happened – it was a feeling that I can’t begin to explain. I battled and battled with an overwhelming feeling of feeling sorry for Dad, for the fact that he didn’t know what was going to happen to him and for the fact that he suffered pain that last weekend of his life. I would read text messages that he sent a few weeks before he died telling me about things he had enjoyed and my mind would not allow me to stop thinking ‘poor thing, he didn’t know!’ and agonising over it all. My rational thoughts made me think that who would want to know they are going to suffer crushing pain and be rushed to hospital, only to die – I know I wouldn’t want to know – I’d rather live my last few days and enjoy myself without worry of suffering or wondering how those I leave behind would cope. I also kept telling myself that we hardly need to feel sorry for Dad now - he’s in Heaven! What better place could there be?!– Dad would not want us to feel sorry for him. But these rational and true thoughts could not stop me aching with feeling sorry for him.

I think feeling sorry for him was the hardest thing for me the weeks immediately following his death. The pain of losing him was softened by a real sense of peace from God and such assurance of God’s hand in all of this. The pain of knowing I would miss him so much was less hard to bear knowing that I will see Dad again one day in glory. But feeling sorry for him….it was so overwhelming and I thought I was going to go crazy battling through it. It was much of this that physically made my heart ache.

But I did begin to work through it and other battles in my head have come and gone since then – or so I thought. This is where I’m learning that it all comes in waves. I can be so philosophical about it all and feel like I’m handling it. I have felt that I’m moving forward and letting myself work through each stage and each struggle. But these last few weeks have been hard – and the emotions have changed. I’m beginning to feel sorry for Dad again and go over many things that I’ve already gone over and thought I’d put behind me. But this time, instead of the pain these feelings brought before, I’ve felt stressed and irritable – knotted up inside and all the other feelings that come with stress. These feelings take their toll physically and emotionally. I think I preferred the pain at the start. I don’t like feeling wound up at the slightest thing or letting what is normally daily life stress me out. I just want to relax!

I definitely think feeling like this must be part of grief. I have heard that anger is one of the stages of grief. But I have not felt angry about what has happened because I totally believe that this is God’s plan. I have not once doubted that God is working out His perfect plan in all of this. So I wonder if I am experiencing the anger that comes as part of grief, but it’s just directed at other things and showing itself as stress.

It doesn’t help that I can’t stop dreaming about Dad. I think dreams can affect how we feel so much more than we think. I must have at least 3 dreams a week about him. Some I don’t mind – the ones where he is just in the dream, not particularly featuring a great deal but just there with everyone else. They’re quite nice as he is so real that for a time it’s like having him here. Others, though, give a false sense of excitement – I frequently dream that he comes back and says that he hasn’t died but has been away on business. I wake up from these and feel a bit confused, and it gradually dawns on me that it was a dream. But the worst are dreams about him being ill and in pain, about his heart attack. I dream about him talking to us and we know he’s going to die but he doesn’t (which doesn’t help me in feeling sorry for him and that wasn't what happened as we didn't know). I hate those dreams, and they’re awful to wake up from. These dreams have been going on or weeks and weeks and I wonder when they’ll begin to get less frequent. I wouldn’t mind if Dad was in my dreams for the rest of my life, but I just want the horrible ones to stop.

So I guess this is all part of the stages of grief – part of the different ‘waves’. And through it all God continues to be faithful. It’s a tough thing to bear, but (and please don’t take this the wrong way), I am thankful for what has happened. I don’t mean that I’m thankful for the specific fact that Dad has died, but that I am going through a time like this. It’s really changed my perspective on life and it has been amazing to experience God’s peace and comfort in such a wonderful way (despite my continuing lack of faithfulness to him!). I could write forever on what God has taught me through this, but I won’t – I’ve gone on for long enough! This has probably been a very depressing and moaning entry which I didn’t mean for it to be, but I suppose the point of this blog was to write down how I feel in this journey. I don’t know how anyone ever comes to terms with a death, but without God I don’t know how people could cope at all. When I sing in church, or sing along to Christian CDs in my car, I think about Dad in heaven and feel like we are sharing in something together. I believe heaven is full of singing in response to the glory of God, and now I like to think that we are joining with the angels and the saints in heaven who are singing continually to God. How amazing their praise and worship must be as they are seeing Christ face to face and know his glory in all its fullness. And that is what Dad is doing and experiencing!!!! That gives a lot of strength through the sadness of losing someone who belongs to Christ. And even if Dad hadn’t been a Christian and was not now in the presence of God, I’m sure God would have ministered to me and my family in a real and powerful way because He is so good. But I praise God that He saved my Dad, and that his pain and suffering and struggles in this life really have come to an eternal end.