When my father died after a long and gruesome fight against cancer, he left me rattling around in a big, empty, deathly quiet house with a sudden rush of spare time because my days and nights were no longer filled with nursing him. I needed to fill all that empty space. I needed to fill my empty, broken, grieving heart. So I made a list …
I called it my “unGrief” list
I started by writing down everything that might bring me some sort of comfort, some kind of happiness, a little bit of peace. I called it my un-grief list (my brothers renamed it my happy list), and over the first few months of my loss, I referred to it often. I stuck it on the fridge so that I could be reminded that one part of me wasn’t lost, one part of me had some ideas of how I could get through this.
It helped, more than you could know
This little list of mine covered everything from reminding me to reach out for help (phone a friend) to ideas for healing (breathe, meditate, dance, paint) to things that would simply make me happy (use that spa voucher damnit, take that walk on the beach, go for a picnic).
I wrote down ideas for filling the empty house (redecorate, invite friends over again, find new music, play it loud). I added ideas for growth and creativity and especially focussed on bringing all those much loved but now very-much-neglected things back into my life.
My little list of happiness was there whenever I felt broken
Whenever I felt lost or fragile or empty or torn apart or too broken to deal with the moment, I didn’t need to scratch through my mind for some way to lighten the loss or the pain or the panic, I just needed to look at the list and do whatever jumped out at me.
And slowly, it started changing my life. It started changing me. Because grief changes us anyway. We’re never the same after a being we love dances their final dance. So if we’re going to be changed, if we’re going to find a different way of being, we may as well try to stitch back the pieces of us we love most.
Further reading …
“How Art Therapy Started Healing My Grief”
I eventually turned my grief into creativity. Because really, there was storm lashing inside of me. Like a wild mesh of tangled lightning, there was grief, PTSD, and bipolar, all raging in my body, my heart, my mind, all at the same time … I was a crumpled, chaotic, disintegrating mess and I desperately needed to find some light amongst the fractures and all the broken spaces inside of me, and so I turned to an ancient and buried love … I finally turned back to art. It had more power than I could imagine. And so I kept finding more and more kinds of art therapy to heal my grief in different ways. I found something deeply sacred … maybe you can too.
Read more in “How Art Therapy Started Healing My Grief”
