How Long Does It Take?

Hey, my grandmother died in 1997 and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't miss her and remember her. It would be a truly sad thing if that ever happens. Memories of lost loved ones aren't BAD things, they're GOOD ones. Bittersweet, true, but very, very good.

One never forgets, EOE, but remembering does become easier.

Oh. Didn't mean to imply that i don't want to remember my folk. I'm just wondering when will the good memories start to overtake the sad ones.

When my grandmother died my mother described it as "someone dropped a boulder on her chest" and many years later she said "the boulder eventually became a pebble that never went away". I think there is always a piece of that grief inside and you just learn to live with it.

Yes, since my husband died, I find myself crying over strange things not even related.

EOE, reread what I said, honey. In essence, it's exactly what Green Witch has cited.

Thanks for the replies so far. It's been on my mind to start this thread for a few days so I hope others are able to join and share in the discussion.

Actually Letty, my earlier response was for the blacksmith, writing about memories of his grandmother. I think he may have read in my original post that I did not want to remember my loved ones or something wild like that, and I wanted to get him straight about that. I do have wonderful memories of my parents and my brother but all too often, it seems to me, I dwell on the pain of their deaths and that's what I want to put behind me and get past.

It does get easier with time.
When I was a teenager, my family and I sat in my grandfather's hospital room while the nurse turned off his life support equipment. There was nothing more that could be done for him, so my grandmother made the decision. Watching him pass away, not being able to do anything for him, was the hardest thing I've ever had to do. It was on my mind constantly for a long time. But, with time, I learned to think of the good times when the bad times tried to creep in. I can remember him reading to my brother and I when we were children. We would sit on his knee while he read "Captain Kitty" to us. I have this book now, the very copy he used to read to us, and look forward to reading it to my children and grandchildren someday. When I find myself reminiscing about him, I get out this book and remember what a wonderful person he was.
You never forget. You just learn to live, and keep on loving.

eoe
I know how you feel as I am in a similar boat. It sometimes gets easier with time, and sometimes the burden can stay the same.

Eoe, the best advice someone gave me duing a time when I was grieving was to ignore the nagging inside to "get over it" and move on. You never get over losing someone; you just get used to them not being around and you go on as best you can.

And day by day, things get a little easier. But certain things will always trigger your memory. I find myself tearing up sometimes over someone I lost nearly 12 years ago. I have dreams about him but it's been a long, long time since I've had bad thoughts about his death.

Perhaps it would help for you to set aside a time every day to sit down and think of each of them and some good memory you had with them. Maybe write it down. It might be really hard for a while, and you'll probably cry, but maybe by reprogramming your brain you can start to think of happy things rather than the sad ones. Right now, you are probably unconsciously trying so hard NOT to think of anything bad and our minds have quite a way of screwing with us. this Fathers Day why don't you do something that reminds you of him when he was at his best. Honor his life. Remind yourself what a great man he was and how wonderful his life was and how he affected yours. Make it positive. The negative will probably bubble up but it's worth a shot.

I don't know. I wrote a lot. It took me a while to not be angry with him and then longer to accept that it was final. But whatever you do, don't try and hold back your tears and pain. It's important for you to grieve. And you've lost a lot in a short time. You deserve a good cry.

Believe me Bella, I've cried more in the last six years than in my entire life. I'm tired of crying. No. I'm tired of dwelling on the bad. I think with my mother, I still have issues with how she died, without even knowing what was happening to her, and I just haven't come to a place of acceptance about it yet. That's why it still eats me up so.

I think Bella's got a good idea, to honor memories of when they were at their best. And to not think "I've got to get over this." Because that's just crazy. While the grief should, presumably, lighten a bit, forcing yourself to just be over and done with it is not going to work out because it shouldn't.

I think of my grandmothers whenever I cook, particularly whenever I improvise, and I tend to see my mother's mother's face when I look in the mirror these days. I think of my uncle, who loved cars, when I buckle up. I think of my grandfather whenever I read or watch anything about fossils. I think of one of my great-uncles when I hear someone play an organ. I think of a different great-uncle when I go fishing. I don't want to get over that.

I hear what all of you are saying and it's not all gloom here and I shouldn't paint it that way. I do think about them, at certain times, in connection to a movie or music or remembering something funny that was said and I burst out laughing and yes, those are good memories. My father was a hoot. (when he wasn't beiing hateful.) But way too often something will trigger a thought or an emotion and I'm back in the hospital with them, willing to give anything to make it better for them, but helpless and bleary-eyed with grief. I thought perhaps deepdown, I felt guilty about something or felt that I didn't do everything that I could have but I did my best.

Losing a mother, sibling- any loved one, leaves an emotion that always moves with one, shoulder to shoulder, through life. We are ever aware of it, though we become busy over a period of time and spend less time dwelling on it. I lost my brother in 1969 and my mother several years later. Never a day passes that I don't in some way acknowledge the sadness, sometimes majorly, but most often allowing it to pass as I go about the activity of the day. For me it has never gotten much easier.

It actually took me decades to have the majority of memories of my father and mother be mostly ones of the good days. I don't really think it is a question of honoring the good times.. if death has been a long time coming and some of those memories are excruciating, then a lot of that will be what your brain will tap into first, however you may desire to direct your nerve cells.

With my mother, her death loosened some brain clamp for me and opened up mental room for good memories, albeit slowly. With my father, my active grief in the years he was failing mentally and dying was more searingly painful, but I could reach the good memories more often, more easily.

I lost my father in 1990 and my mother in 1997. I try to remember the best things about them.

I have pictures of them at happy times in their lives. These photos are framed and hung where I see them several times every day. It has helped me rewrite my "script" about their deaths.

Talking to people who knew them well always helps, too.

How do you "rewrite the script", Eva?

It helps me put their deaths in context, eoe.

Dad committed suicide because of severe health problems. We went through hell. Instead of focusing on the tragedy of his death, I now choose to see it as proof of his insistence on living (and dying) on his own terms. He was a very strong-willed man. Looking at a picture of him surrounded by all of us (that's when he was always the happiest), I realize that he always did what he thought was best for us. His death was no different. He thought he would be sparing us needless months of agony and expense. Whether he was right or wrong, I have to respect him for doing what he thought was best.

Mom had a massive heart attack while dressing to go to her volunteer job one morning. She was sitting on the edge of her bed, and simply fell backward onto the soft comforter. They said she probably never knew what happened. It was a horrible shock to all of us, and we grieved deeply. However, now I look at her picture and think about what a chronic worrier she always was, and how she fretted about becoming a burden to us as her health declined. She suffered from severe back problems for years and was slowly becoming incapacitated by the pain. But as it turned out, she didn't have to worry any more. She went the way we all hope to go someday. Good for her. She was always so good to everyone, she deserved it.

This is how I have rewritten their death stories in my mind. By coming to a better understanding of how their deaths fit their lives. It has taken me a long time. Things are better now.

Oh yes Eva. I do remember you speaking on your father in another thread a few years ago. And I do see where you're coming from. With my father, he demanded his independence until the end but spent the last three days of his life in a nursing home. I like to think that he took control and died instead of staying there a moment longer. But that's my point. Why can't I forget the sight of him in there? When I asked him how he was feeling, he said that he felt "like nothing". He wasn't just sad or angry, he was humiliated and it was heartbreaking.

The Year of Magical Thinking
by Joan Didion

From Diana Manister


In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion's eighth book to make it to The New York Times best-seller list, an author known for her intellectual analysis of personal and global events reveals the limited power of intelligence to defend her against a breakdown as she struggles to cope with the death of her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, and the simultaneous grave illness of their daughter.

Didion's reportage of her reactions during her annus horribilus - disbelief, denial, attempts to go back in time and re-play events so that they turn out differently - are so ruthless in their candor that any reader familiar with her consummately logical mind will be moved by her desperate attempt to fend off uncontrollable vortices of emotional pain by resorting to primitive superstition, incantation and belief in magic.

Because Joan Didion's claim to fame is her power to penetrate to reality when most of us are indulging in self-gratifying fictions, she is the American writer we depend on to disabuse us of our cultural myths and our complacencies. In book after book, she turned the cool laser beam of her mind on subjects as divergent as Hollywood, America at the end of the sixties, El Salvador, the soullessness of Southern California, and her own psychotherapy, always warning about the abyss lying in wait beneath ordinary events -- the snakes in the jacarandas, the coyotes peering from the shoulders of the highway, the CIA agent turning up dead in a hotel pool -- so to watch her fall into a chaos she has not expected is shocking indeed. As John Leonard writes, "If Joan Didion went crazy, what are the chances for the rest of us? Not good."

"To the average observer I would have appeared to fully understand that death was irreversible, she writes, but this is how far she travels from sanity: she catches herself keeping John's shoes in the closet because he will need them when he comes back; she orders an autopsy based on the irrational belief that if the cause of death were known, the death could be prevented; when his obituaries appear, she holds on to her private unreality: "I had allowed other people to think he was dead. I had allowed him to be buried alive."

John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion were a Spencer Tracy-Katherine Hepburn couple who offset each other in the best possible ways; they took turns deflating each other's grandiosities and argued Socratically as they worked out their thoughts. In the moments before he collapsed in their New York apartment, they had been discussing "why the first world war was the critical event from which the entire rest of the 20th century flowed." Neither could imagine living without the other. Whether collaborating on screenplays, or simply writing side by side day after day for forty years, they were rarely out of range of the sound of the other's voice.

They were well-known and well-connected: "They believed absolutely in the power of the telephone numbers they had at their fingertips, the right doctor, the major donor, the person who could facilitate a favor at State or Justice." All their lives, they believed that having the facts provided a means towards controlling chaos. Even after her husband's death, as her daughter lies in a coma in a New York hospital, she learns all she can about her illness and its treatment, as if that could restore her daughter to health. She wears medical scrubs on her visits and learns hospital jargon, as if she were part of the medical team. "Information was control."

When forced by events to admit that having all the facts about her husband's heart disease and her daughter's septic shock have no effect at all on their conditions, admissions that come gradually and only as a result of her facing her own illusions, her intellectual defenses crumble. She is at a loss except for her mad superstitions and the comfort of remembering lines from great writers - sprinkled throughout her narrative are tiny tributes to Thomas Mann, C.S. Lewis, Matthew Arnold and others, offered in gratitude for their articulation of her grief and slow recovery.
by Joan Didion

Both Joan Didion and John Gregory Dunne were agnostic about everything except communicating truth by putting the right words in the right order. Even when stress overwhelms her she is careful with language, stating only her actual experience: "Tightness in the throat. Choking, need for sighing."

John Leonard says "I've been trying for four decades to figure out why her sentences are better than mine or yours...something about cadence." Lean, commaless prose has always been Didion's trademark, but in The Year of Magical Thinking she pares her sentences down as if she is re-learning how to put words together. Having been blindsided by a loss she deluded herself into believing would not occur, her life now depends on eliminating falsehoods.

Even when her beliefs are irrational, she is meticulous about reporting them truthfully - precise descriptions of her derangements give her someplace to begin, a few reliable facts on which to build a new vision of life that integrates uncertainty. She finds that a line T.S. Eliot wrote in the wasteland of Europe after World War I fits her attempt to use words again, as she stands in the blasted landscape of her widowhood: "These fragments I have shored against my ruins."

The Year of Magical Thinking is a compelling read, as we follow Didion through the failure of her belief system to sustain her in extreme stress, to her derangement and the gradual integration of her understanding of her tragedy into a more reliable vision. Along the way, she reveals the communality of grief by describing in searing detail how raw emotional pain can engulf even the most defended and privileged among us.

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