Ripples

In Memory of Kolleen Roberts THE KORO of MACOMB COUNTY

By Ralph Roberts MACOMB COUNTY # 1 REALTOR FATHER HUSBAND DAD

A rainy day on Lake St. Clair,

I watch the rain splash down upon the water,

Each drop disappearing in the surface, forming ripples,

Undulating rings expanding out across the lake.

Each droplet squeezed from mysterious clouds,

Some natural phenomenon I never understood—

Condensation or precipitation,

Or some other lesson I had never learned.

On a sunnier day in May,

There is unhealthy grief. Unhealthy grief is loss not addressed by choice. Think of unhealthy grief in terms of food. French fries although tasty are unhealthy for our body. Eating french fries once a month probably will not kill you nor cause you to gain weight. A regular daily diet of french fries eventually will make you obese and clog your arteries (usually irreversible event) and ultimately cause death. Therefore, most of us make a choice to avoid regular doses of french fries. Likewise we must consciously choose to resolve all of our grief if we ever hope to heal our pain and live life to its fullest.

The most common form of unhealthy grief is denying that the loss ever took place. This is usually a result of not wanting to admit that there has been an event in our lives that brought on change or sadness. Emotionally ignoring loss can have long-term effects. For example, when my mother-in-law died, my husband refused to acknowledge her passing by not having even the smallest memorial service for her. There was no family gathering with whom to share her story,, no community expression of love. Instead he went to work the next day and everyday thereafter and we never talked about it again. It was most confusing to me, because he adored his mother, as did I. When we deny our loss, the customary, even ritualistic if you will, manner of beginning the grieving process is thwarted. This is experiencing unhealthy grief. Three months after her passing, my husband was bedridden for six months with a virus. Unhealthy grief manifests into unhealthy affects on our every day lives.

Post traumatic stress is not reserved just for witnessing the miseries of war or experiencing a horrible crime. There can be traumas in is an everyday experiences. Trauma lingers, it’s as simple as that. It shows up regularly in all of life’s events. The same traumatic experience will have different residual effects of trauma on different people.

Some examples of these simple pre and post loss traumas could be watching a loved one suffer in their last days of cancer or witnessing an accident whether fatal or not. The anticipation of telling your spouse and children you were fired from your job is also traumatic. The funeral process, the lack of a funeral, or your inability to participate in the funeral, all present traumatic energy that needs releasing and healing.

     Whether you are the griever, or trying to assist the griever in working through grief, an awareness of the customs and traditions used by other cultures immediately after death and through the grieving process can be helpful.  This manual is about helping you experience your grief and/or the grief of others without judgment.  Confusion or judgment can often surface at school, in the work place, hospitals, and nursing homes or between friends when time is not taken to understand the cultural and traditional differences that exist between us.  We will not pretend here to give you every cultural tradition on the planet.  That would take a volume of encyclopedias.  We are attempting to show that the rituals surrounding death are deeply rooted in religious, nationality, and even neighborhood differences. 

The loss of a pet is traumatic. After all aren’t they a member of our family? Our society does not really understand the seriousness of grief as it relates to the pet owner. Consequently, attention to and proper space for grieving pet loss is ignored.

For most of us, our first experience with grief is usually as a child where the pet hamster, or the family pet died. Even the loss of fish can pull on a child’s heart strings. My husband’s immune system became challenged when his German Shepherd of 14 years passed away. For a year he suffered with cytomegalovirus. It actually crippled him to the extent of being off work for six months. Truth is, I believe he never afforded himself the opportunity to grieve his beloved Panda’s loss. His body ultimately provided that for him.

There are too many adults walking around today still suffering from unresolved grief as a result of a loss they experienced as a child. A woman tells of losing the horse she had for five years, when she was 12 years old, to a sudden heart attack. She had won many shows with this horse and simply adored him. She was the one to find him in the barn after he died. After he was buried, two days later, her parents told her it was time to forget about her horse. She not only lacked the personal and emotional skills to deal with her grief at the age of 12, she wasn’t allowed to express her feeling of loss. She therefore stuffed the grief somewhere in her soul where it would hurt the least. She was 50 years old when she told me this story and cried while relating it as if it happened yesterday.