People love a train wreck. MJ’s life resembles a train wreck and now people are gathering over the wreckage. Why is it when someone dies, no matter WHO they might have been in life, everyone wants part of the action? I remember telling my girls on the eve of my late husband’s memorial: let’s preserve our dignity—let’s fake it. I told stories of Jackie Kennedy and her behavior at Pres. Kennedy’s service: dignified, composed and stoic. I knew even then that there would be people there who came to see “the wreckage of a family”, the raw emotions of people on display. We all held ourselves with dignity and grace. We fell apart in the safety of those who were really THERE for us, not for the “show.”
Bearing witness to the Michael Jackson drama confirms my view: people who were flawed in life come up for sainthood in death. It’s been fascinating to watch the interviews with celebrities who sob and cry over the loss of the King of Pop but who abandoned him in his fall from grace. Interviewers ask, “When was the last time you talked to Michael?” and almost to a heartbroken soul the reply was, “years”…dating back to the beginning of his fall from grace.
So, now people come out. Michael Jackson music tops the ITunes charts, stores sell out of Thriller, cities hold Michael Jackson rallies and tributes. And, I ponder, where were they all when he really needed support? Where were they when the alleged lure of oxycontin and demerol where his only “friends”? Where were they when the only ones who provided him with aid and comfort were those who used him? Where were they when he was bankrupt on all fronts : emotionally, physically, spiritually and professionally?
Yes, all the “best friends” come out at the news of tragedy. They come out and proclaim what a loss the world has experienced. They come out with tales of greatness, tales of personal impact, tales of love. But, when hard times hit–when he really needed friends–where were they?
It’s chilling to see how fickle people can be. They cheer a kid born in Gary, Indiana to a steel worker on his rise to the King of Pop…and they jeer his fall to “freak”, alleged pedophile, and tormented, drug addicted soul. Yet, on the night of his tragic death his music fills the airwaves once again, people the world over willing to forget the pariah and proclaiming the saint. Twitter and Facebook crash because the news spreads so fast and furious.
Quietly I wondered, how different his life might have been if the intense love and gratitude shown in his death had only been shown to him in his life. Millions–hundreds of millions–gather worldwide to bid MJ good-bye. How different our lives would would be if those who gather when it is too late would come around while there is still time!
Don’t wait !
Stay tuned for further details ! Get ready to build those POSITIVITY muscles so when NEGATIVITY HITS (it always does) you will have a reservoir of GOOD JUJU to call on…
My current “read” is Curious ? by Todd Kashdan, PhD. I “whoop” at various moments when reading ( that’s a good sign) and I am mulling over a couple of ideas in particular. The first is a definition of happiness attributed to the Dali Lama which essentially suggests that happiness is the ability to embrace life in all it’s seasons, both the positive as well as the negative. I have gotten frustrated when I identify myself as a positive psychologist and people envision me as promoting only sunshine, butterflies and happy faces. Indeed that is not the case, BUT, it is the case that embracing all of life’s challenges IS the point, not just the pathological or dysfunction that seemed to be the currency when I was a traditional psychologist.
The difference in my vision now is that indeed we will all be slammed with disappointments, tragedies, and just plain “bad stuff” the longer we live. The real “art ” of living is how we manage those situations. Being widowed suddenly knocked the life out of me for a while, I still feel remnants of that pain on a daily basis, BUT my life did not end there. The ability to rebound from the pain needs to be the focus. The ability to let go, move on, turn things over is where the skill of living begins.
Kashdan makes a compelling argument about a life well lived. He begins by describing the merits of being mindful of living in the moment. Of being an active participant in life. Too often when adversity hits we hunker down, begin identifying with the role of victim, and somehow stop moving forward in the present moment. We essentially “wallow” in the grief all the while missing those wonderous moments of joy.
The joy is ever present, but being locked into the pain creates blinders.
So, that’s that. Good read. Keep the faith…and realize that the suffering is option, but the pain may not be.
Blog on,
Beth
One of the motivations behind this blog was my own despair I experienced as a widow. The crushing silence, the words left unspoken, the aloneness at times was overwhelming . I was in an fortunate/unfortunate as a member of the mental health community, people assumed I had support. Unfortunately, I was hesitant to “burn out” too many friends by reaching out, and I eventually found a terrific local professional I could talk to. My other very smart move was to work with a life coach for over 2 years during my most challenging times.
I have received messages through this blog that describe the emotional despair many grieving people experience. Too often this grief is magnified and distorted because of the use of mind altering substances.
There are community resources available to you ! Reach out to your physician, spiritual advisor, Alcoholics Anonymous, Narcotics Anonymous, Women for Sobriety, Hospice…or call your local hot line.
You do NOT have to go through any of this alone !
REACH OUT LOCALLY and get the help you need.
(Your children have already survived an unbearable loss through the loss of a parent, they must not be subjected to the loss of a second parent!)
My youngest daughter introduced me to the concept of mini meltdowns a couple of years ago. Of course I had been having them for all of my life, but the label really helps. I think we all recognize a mini meltdown, that feeling of the blood leaving your head, that weird feeling in the stomach, and most importantly, that feeling that life will ALWAYS feel that bad. UGH. It’s like the black hole of forever.
Daniel Golbberg, Stumbling on Happiness, discusses the fact that as humans we have an almost IMPOSSIBLE time at predicting how we will feel in the future. So, if we are feeling blue now, imagining we will feel anything but blue is not part of our wiring.
Following any loss I have experienced, be it death, loss of a job, children leaving home I never thought I would ever manage to move beyond that endless emptiness. And of course, that would be when I would choose to journal. Life sucks, I have no friends, I will never be happy again. So, when happiness hits I frequently “forget” what the mini meltdown felt like…I certainly didn’t journal about being happy.
I have a friend who has challenged herself to a year of taking photos and creating a digital scrapbook. Not being a forever or even a yearly girl, I decided for “right now” to take a picture daily of something I am grateful for. I am going to build my journal around those photos. It’s kinda neat to look beyond what is and find something, anything, that warms me up.
It’s 19 degrees here. Four months following my late husband’s death and following the first Christmas my three girls and I spent without him, we came home to a very cold house. Long story short, the furnace went out. Busted. So for what seemed like months I had no heat, except for a space heater in the back room. It was a crazy time, but a friend brought me an electric blanket, friends came and cleaned up the flood created by the breaking of the frozen pipes. People were good to me.
The new furnace was expensive. Really expensive, but I had never bought a furnace before. I was furious at my late husband (it happens, that’s ok) because there was a bucket in the furnace room and I thought….hmmm he knew that thing was gonna blow. After all it was really old.
Yesterday when it was 9 degrees I went out and took a picture of my now “not new” furnace. And, instead of slumping into the awful feelings I remember having at the time of one of many MAJOR MELTDOWNS I got warm inside. I remembered the incredible kindness of people teaching me how to use a wet vac, the coziness of a borrowed electric blanket, the generosity of people cheering me up.
But, what I remember most of all was the lesson I learned during that period, and it’s a lesson I have to learn again and again during major or mini meltdowns. I really believed I was the only person in this town with a broken furnace, flooded carpet, and ruined sheetrock. The only one experiencing pain and discomfort. My “teacher” was the great young man working for a carpet restoration company who came out with industrial fans to dry the carpets. He told me the story of a family he had to go help after he left my house. Not only did their pipes freeze and break, but the septic or sewer system had backed up and they had septic and sewer waste throughout the home they had just finished building.
So, not that that made my meltdown any less horrible to me, it did remind me, we are never alone. There is always someone out there who is our companion as we survive yet another meltdown. Reaching out, lending a hand is sometimes the very best path to getting over your own mini meltdown
So, don’t go it alone.
Beth
I am sure it’s a myth, or another of my denial mechanisms, but the New Year always makes me feel giddy. I mean, anything is possible. On New Year’s Eve I spend time (some times lots of time) writing out my resentments and “bad feelings” about things, people, and events that seem to eat away at my core. I compile all this scraps of paper, burn them (safely), save the ashes and when the ground thaws I bury the ashes. Once those resentments are burned, they are gone. I cannot revisit those resentments. They go up into the cosmos.
My first act of this New Year is to join Facebook. Needless to say I have many friends who are much younger than I am and they have encouraged me to join the net-generation. So, I have been having a grand time tackling a new task and it’s been quite fun and quite challenging. That kind of activity keeps us from focusing on the stuff that’s “wrong, unfair and the things we can do nothing about.”
Part of my new coaching endeavors is going to be establishing my Happiness Boot Camp as part of my Facebook profile. Not sure how that is going to come together, but you know what? I am ready for a change. I am tired of focusing of what went wrong this year in my life, in my friends lives, in the economy, it’s time to focus on what’s right. SO, I am going back to my original roots of studying and sharing the results of the positive psychology research.
Again, not rocket science, but there’s some exciting things going on out there that will enable us all to manage those rough patches in life (like widowhood), but hopefully with the aid of fellow travelers we will be able to accomplish this.
I am learning about webinars, groups conducted with people all over the country via phone where the kind of support and connection can be achieved. The training program I have partipated in for over three years is conducted via phone and it is a natural forum to develop community and combat isolation.
So, stay tuned for the new and improved blog for 2009. I guess my two week stint in the hospital this summer with a lung abscess paid off after all. As I was feeling “victimized” and “abandoned” by the cosmos much the way I felt when I was widowed, I knew something “good” would come from the despair.
This must be it.
Happy New Year !
Just prior to my late husband’s death, I hired a coach. I had been a licensed psychologist for years, worked with psychologist’s both personally and professionally, but fell in love with positive psychology. Positive psychology has become the domain for coaches and so, I researched coaching programs and coaches and selected a wonderful life coach ( who had been trained and practiced as a psychologist.)
Ironically two months later my husband passed away. I already had a relationship with this coach and I worked with her for two years following my husband’s untimely death. To this day, I still view her as my “main support person” for personal issues and challenges, she is my “go to woman.”
So, although I have stopped my clinical practice as a psychologist, and am developing my coaching practice, I must say, find a coach…find someone who will help you adapt to the changes in your “new life.” Find someone who will help you uncover your strengths, who will encourage you to move forward, who will gently encourage you that there is life beyond widowhood.
If not me, well, I can direct you to some awesome coaches.
Just do something proactive, you owe that to yourself!
Fondly,
Beth
Wow,
So much has happened to me during the last nine months, a little like birthing a baby.
I remember when I was widowed people swore, life will change, it will get better. And, indeed it has.
The changes started to come as I eased my way away from my identity as “widow” and tried on different roles and identity.
I think back now and how whenever I had contact with people I would preface that contact with the statement that I was a widow. I guess I wanted them to know that place I was coming from. The pain I was experiencing.
And now, it’s the season, yet again. The season that screams out family, together, closeness. And, although I never would have believed it this is my fourth Christmas without my late husband and I am not feeling that profound emptiness, meaningless, and pain that seemed to wash over the three previous holiday seasons.
Much has changed but getting very, very ill last summer was my ultimate “wake-up call.” I spent over 2 weeks in the hospital with an “hole in my lung” and met my life face to face. A wonderful friend said that perhaps this illness was a way for me to burn out all the bad “karma” which had happened over the previous few years.
After my late husband died my mantra was, “he died, I didn’t” but now as I look back perhaps a part of me died, and my illness last summer brought me face to face with that psychic death. I affirmed my will to live late one night in the hospital as I contemplated all my blessings, all the new people who had entered into my life.
You see, my widowhood brought along with it a lot of resentment, pain and anger. I believe that resentment, pain and anger bubbled away in me. I looked for “slights” I looked for the people who were no longer in my life, I looked for ways in which I had been wronged by people who had formerly been my friends.
Now I realize that seething over what I perceived to be slights did nothing but increase my pain. Instead I began to focus on the new people who brought joy into my life, appreciated the old friends who stayed by my side, and opened up my world to new adventures and new growth.
So, now I am back ready to be there for those facing widowhood only now I am another year wiser, have eliminated self pity that accompanied slights both real and imagined.
This is a wonderful season of darkness. A time to go within, contemplate, and emerge anew.
This is also a time to remember that pain does not go on forever, and that there are many new and wonderful adventures awaiting each and every one of us.
Here’s to a really new year.
Blessings
As I look back on my period of grief, I remember being incredibly upset with myself that after four months I wasn’t better. My grief continues even today, but in a much different form. Now it is an honoring of what was and a celebration of what is.
Yesterday I spent time with a new friend, a friend I became aquainted with because of our widow’s status. We sat, had tea, reviewed our lives since widowhood and looked at one another with love and curiosity.
Both of us are in solid relationships now, yet both of us marvel at the questions which seem to haunt us. Does the past ever go away, do old friends return, or are we destined to create and entirely new support community? Either way, can’t someone tell us the rules? The rules which will enable the old friends to celebrate our new lives, or are we destined in the minds of our old friends to be “widowed forever” ?
As old friends do, we laughed at our inquiries, commenting that when we were newly widowed we wanted a “book on how to do it.” When do I take off the wedding ring? When do I date? When do my old friends call? That book is sorely needed and missed.
And now, as she and I have moved forward, our questions continue…when can we celebrate moving forward while honoring the past? When, if ever, will the friends who knew us before, celebrate our new lives ?
Shoot, there are no books for motherhood, widowhood, divorcehood (is that a word?)
We all do our best, stumbling in the dark…reaching out to those we trust…leaving some behind but discovering “new friends” anew.
Blessings to the old and new friends who care over tea.
To celebration,
Beth
Whew, a whirlwind time. Since January 2008 my life has been a series of wonderful adventures, but being way from home takes a toll.
I recall reading “somewhere” that when a person loses a spouse they lose “half” of their memory. Makes sense in so many ways because as a “team” you rely on the other to tend to certain things.
With loss and transition of any kind we lose a piece of our former selves (to be regained in other ways).
I remember following the death of our sweet dog I HATED doing yard work. For some reason I didn’t want to go outside and work . I realized slowly that part of working in the yard had to do with Neeko chasing tennis balls and then dropping them in any hole I dug…the yard-game would begin…Once realized and accepted the yard work didn’t seem so daunting.
The dis-ease we experience with transitions is normal..to be expected, but still challenging.
How to welcome the challenge? How to step up to the challenge?
Interesting article in Newsweek about the mistake of seeking “happiness” and rejecting normal sorrow. Positive psychology is NOT about rejecting sorrow, it is about creating circumstances (both internal and external) that increase a sense of well-being…and sometimes well-being is enhanced by having a good cry…managing whatever comes up at a given time.
There’s been a resurgence in attachment theory in the literature and clinical practice of psychology. The short version is that our sense of well-being is enhanced by having “secure attachments” Remember Harlow’s wire monkey-mommies? Hard to form an attachment to a wire “mommy”
Transitions always accompany a shift and change in attachment. And in many ways that loss of the “secure attachment” creates anxiety, feelings of being abandoned, and a general sense of loss. Oftentimes we don’t take the time to absorb and manage those changes or “losses” of attachment instead we question why we are feeling so out of sorts.
It has been almost seven months since I closed my clinical practice. Lots of loss associated with that. My clients’ whom I adored, my colleagues who brightened my world and challenged me, my identity as a “psychologist.” Even though the change was predicated on the belief that I needed to move into a new and challenging career, there was loss.
I remember when both of my daughters were “launched” and left home. What a strange and challenging time for all of us. Here was mom laughing and crying all at the same time. Delighted that my “girls” were venturing out into the “big world” while at the same time missing our Sunday night “beauty shop time”. Wanting them to do EXACTLY what they were doing, but at the same time feeling the emptiness that followed.
So, as I sit here typing away, still feeling the “stupids” from the airplane air, I think today I will be a kinder and gentler Beth. Give myself a break from the “shoulds” and the ought-to’s”…I will just “be here now” and know that is exactly where I am meant to be.