\u201cWhen my husband Stephen died, I was living in a remote place with no people around so I
had to learn to hold my own hand.\u201d<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0– – – Ondrea Levine<\/p>\n
Loss shows up in a lot of different ways. A partner walks out on you. A close friend betrays your trust. You get fired from your job. Your favorite silk blouse goes missing. Your partner cheats on you. Your dog breathes his last breath. A loved one becomes ill and dies.\u00a0<\/p>\n
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Whatever the loss, it hurts, and when you find yourself alone with your pain, you have to figure out how to hold your own hand as you walk the rocky path of healing your heart. I was five when my Great Aunt Ruth passed away. She had a large mole on the side of her chin and I loved her so much, I thought she was so beautiful, I believed it was a beauty mark. I looked at my face in the mirror each morning, hoping that a mole would show up on my chin. I wanted to be as beautiful as she was.<\/p>\n
Aunt Ruth lived with us and every day, she and I took a walk to the neighborhood market where she bought me a piece of chocolate and we put a dime in the slot of a cardboard cutout for \u201cThe March of Dimes.\u201d I was seven when she passed away from brain cancer and after my mother told me that she was gone, she went to her bedroom and closed the door. I sat there in shock. Neither of my parents asked me how I felt. They seemed to think I was too young to feel the loss and I was left painfully alone in my grief.<\/p>\n
On the day of the funeral, I begged them to let me go with them. They said no. I watched them walk out of the house dressed in black and they left me behind with a depth of sorrow I didn’t understand. I had to find a way to cope so I put my aunt\u2019s red suitcase in my closet, I rubbed her Jergen’s Lotion on my hands and I climbed into her bed so I could inhale her smell. That was my childhood version of holding my own hand.<\/p>\n
However small it may be, when we lose something or someone, we deserve our own loving kindness. It almost embarrasses me to write the following, but at the time this mattered to me a great deal. I was
twenty-one and I\u2019d been married for several years to the wrong person but that\u2019s a different story. We were living in England, managing a denim store in Brighton. I was young and insecure, I had judgments about my body and I remember rummaging through the latest arrivals of jeans when I found a pair of bell bottoms that fit me perfectly. I thought they made me look slim and I took them home and put them in my dresser. The next morning when I got up, I opened the dresser and they were gone. I called the shop where the \u201cwrong person\u201d was serving customers. \u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWhat did you do with my jeans?\u201d I asked him.<\/p>\n
\u201cWe were out of stock and someone wanted them,\u201d he said. \u201cI sold them. You have plenty of jeans.\u201d<\/p>\n
I was hurt and angry, I felt betrayed, and then I began to feel loss. My husband didn’t understand how important those jeans were to my self-esteem and if I tried to explain, I knew he would make fun of me. I felt ashamed which only escalated my upset. We lived in an apartment in a cul de sac called Montpelier crescent and I climbed a huge elm tree, sat on a thick branch and cried silently while I watched people walking underneath me. They never looked up and saw me and the safety of the tree and the scent of the leaves soothed me. I was holding my own hand.<\/p>\n
There are many ways to soothe ourselves and heal our pain. Listening to music, deep breathing, painting, dancing, writing, maybe even screaming and sobbing, anything that forces us to dig deeply into the center of our spirits to find compassion for ourselves and heal our hearts. No matter how chaotic and dramatic the situation, if you stay with your feelings and not abandon yourself, you\u2019ll find a way to heal your wound.<\/p>\n
I try to not attach shame to an already painful situation. I listen to myself, even if I don’t like what I\u2019m hearing. I look at myself, even if I don’t like what I\u2019m seeing. I feel the pain, even when I want to go numb and I do my best to stop judging myself for judging myself.<\/p>\n
We\u2019ll never get to a place where we don\u2019t have loss. We are never too young or too old to feel the sting of it. It\u2019s part of being human.<\/p>\n
Composer and poet, Leonard Cohen, said, \u201cThere is a crack in everything. That\u2019s how the light gets in.\u201d<\/p>\n
Just like we feel bereft when a loved one dies, someone will feel the same way about us when it\u2019s our time. I\u2019ll never ask anyone not to grieve for me. It\u2019s like asking someone not to feel. The most painful part of experiencing loss is when you don\u2019t allow yourself to feel it. The willingness to be with loss wakes up compassion. And compassion heals.<\/p>\n
If we keep our hearts open, grief will be our constant companion because everyone experiences loss. We turn to other people to help us but there isn\u2019t always someone there who can understand what we\u2019re going through. It isn\u2019t always possible to tell someone how we feel, so we have to learn to soothe ourselves in the same way that we would soothe someone else whom we love. I\u2019ve learned that healing comes from making room \u00a0for everything to co-exist: grief, relief, joy and loss.<\/p>\n
In his poem, \u201cServant to Servants,\u201d Robert Frost stated quite simply, \u201cThe only way out is through.\u201d<\/p>\n
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\u201cWhen my husband Stephen died, I was living in a remote place with no people around so Ihad to learn to hold my own hand.\u201d \u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 \u00a0– – – Ondrea Levine Loss shows up in a lot of different ways. A partner walks out on you. A close friend betrays your trust. You get fired […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":2840,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_et_pb_use_builder":"","_et_pb_old_content":"","_et_gb_content_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2841"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2842,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2841\/revisions\/2842"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/2840"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreacagan.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}