hmmmmm.....

'i feel like such a whiner' she said.

my gosh. i couldn't believe she said that.

her husband died last month,
finances were always tight,
now it's beyond tight.
there was story after story of things gone wrong since then.
each story would have been enough to stress any of us out.
just one of them.
and here there were many.
throw in the grief of this kinda loss and i can't even imagine
tryin' to get by.

there wasn't one bit of whining in her stories.
there was a ton of hardship.

and if anything......there was a ton of grace and hope.
truly. and she didn't even know it.

as i was getting ready to hang up, i reminded her to call when
she was having a hard day. she said she didn't think anyone
really wanted to hear her whining.

i stopped her, told her it wasn't whining and that she was
reinventing her life and trying to figure it out. and i was
always up for talking about that.

and i keep thinking about her.
and the whining comments.
and i think of people i've heard going thru major grief....
how they're told to 'get over it' and 'move on' and all these
maddening things....

i wonder how we've created a place where there's not a space
for this kinda stuff.

everyone i talk to agrees. we need to be able to grieve,
and to fall apart. and as her case so points out....so many
times there's so much more added on top of the grief.
how can we not fall apart?

if everyone i talk to agrees, how come every where i turn i hear
people unable to do that? people apologizing for the place
that they're in. trying to pretend they're not there.

gosh.
a thought just popped in.
it's related to that light in the darkness stuff.
how our speaking our truth and offering our hearts in everything
we do matters and changes things.

well, on a similar vein....what about our accepting our own emotions.
all of them. and allowing the 'bad' ones. the sad, the hurt, the lonely.
allowing them. not trying to shoo them out all the time. allowing them
and knowing they're part of the process.

what if our doing that in our own selves every day helps create a
place for people to do it in their grief?

i've never thought of this before.

i do a lot of 'shooing' myself.
i'm just beginning to learn how to allow the emotions and balance them a bit.
just beginning.
balance is not my forte.

but i like this thought.
and for today, i can try to do that.
allow all of them. and i've got a lot of not so good ones too.
what the heck......this could be really cool.
do this with my friend in mind.
it's not whining.
it's being real.

and it's giving us all permission to be real.

i like that.