How I process grief and loss | Andrea de Michaelis – Creating my own reality, one thought at a time

Someone doesn’t have to die for me to feel grief and loss. Sometimes it’s just a part of them or a part of me, or a situation that dies. Interruption of the daily routine creates the space for the feelings to arise. Watching friends go from completely independent to having to depend on others for the basics is always a real eye opening – and heart opening – experience. I’m 59. I know a lot of people. I’ve lived through the deaths of parents, husbands, brothers, inlaws, coworkers, friends and more each year. I’m not used to it as much as I am just more settled in the thought that no one is really gone. Valerie Saurer said it well on Facebook this week: “Grief is a sneaky thing, crawling through the window like a thief when you’re least expecting it.” This living and dying thing, it’s a process.

I understand about not wanting to make any changes after a loved one dies, wanting to keep their room intact for only you know how long. I get that. I’ve been there so many times. In the beginning, I needed that incubation time as a bridge. After it began happening on a regular basis, I found I prefer processing in a different way.

What helps me the most to process grief is to break the routine. I learned this in 1996 when my mother died. I was prepared to leave for a week’s trip to California with a friend when my mother had her first heart attack. Two days later she passed. I spent the next 6 days driving to California, seeing sights I’d never seen, visiting people I’d never met. I barely had time to miss her, I could pretend in my mind that she was just a phone call away until I was ready to “properly” grieve. Had I been at home, every view and every activity would remind me of her. However, on the trip, not so. I spent the next 8 months living somewhere new, seeing new sights, having new routines, talking to new people, with none of my personal belongings around me. I would face that when I returned home.

As fate would have it, as soon as I returned home, my husband died and that also took my mind off grieving for Mom. There was much paperwork to be done, my entire 4 years with him was filled with paperwork between Florida and Texas, and doing more paperwork helped me feel still connected with him. The year after was spent in a flurry of home repairs for me and for my father in law, all while still the solo publisher for Horizons Magazine as well as having a busy spiritual counseling practice.

When life settled down a few years later, I realized the flurry of activity had eased me right through the grieving process. So much of my time during each day was spent focusing on people and activities that were right in front of me, that I didn’t have much thought time to lament the loss. My thoughts simply turned gradually from having lost them, to “what would they say about this, or that?” Having the conversations with them in my mind brought them more into the present with me, so there was no missing to be had.

That was a big revelation to me. So the next time it happened, I tried something. I spent the entire first days rearranging furniture, completely emptying room by room and putting them back , one by one. None of this moving to one side and put this there instead, nope, empty the entire room. When it’s empty, it’s easy to clean floors and walls, then I smudge the space as well. After that, I took a 3 day trip to somewhere new, for a long weekend nothing I did and no one I met was familiar or routine. As thoughts came up, I processed them. As conversations (within me, with my beloved who’d just passed) came up, I participated in them. Upon returning after 3 days to my newly arranged home, my mind is ready to process the thoughts of the last several weeks. It’s like it works the grief out in my subconscious so I feel minimal, if any, emotional pain.

Of course, by virtue of the work I do, I know that death is not the end, of the person nor of the relationship. And how I process grief may not be how you do. I’m not erasing the memory, I’m simply creating the space for the next adventure to begin.