Life Is Good?

Several times I found myself feeling sad as I thought about their loss, and several times we discussed how sad they were feeling. We were making room for the grief. For some reason, it was very easy for me to see how important it was for my friend to fully experience her sadness. This seemed to be without a doubt the healthiest thing for her to do. As a result, I started to notice my own tendency to avoid grief and sorrow at all costs. I never want to feel sad or acknowledge the losses that I am experiencing in my own life.

Trying to support my friend showed me that I had recently been going through a difficult loss of a different sort. My husband had just accepted a fabulous new job that we were both excited about. The only problem was that this new job meant that we would be living for an undetermined amount of time at a great distance from both of our families. With a new baby and hopes of a growing family, it has been difficult for me to adjust to the idea that we would spend this next season of our lives so far from the people we love. And yet I haven’t been able to let myself grieve this loss. It has been the loss of a dream that I have always had of having young children who would be around their grandparents and cousins and aunts and uncles on a weekly basis. Still, I wouldn’t let myself be sad for fear of undermining the decision about the job. I just kept telling myself that I had to focus on the positive. While it’s important for me not to dwell on my sadness, trying to pretend that these very natural emotions weren’t there wasn’t healthy either. Now, I’m certainly not comparing this loss to that of my friend, but seeing how good it was for her to experience her negative emotions has shown me how healthy it would be for me to be able to do this in my own life.