Author Topic: 2yrs9mths  (Read 2146 times)

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Offline Panda

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2yrs9mths
« on: August 01, 2019, 09:39:57 AM »
It's a little over 2yr9mth since I lost my husband of 35yr. But the pain and the nightmares still keep coming.
He went into hospital and I honestly believed he'd come home. He never did. He died five days after being diagnosed with metastatic  bowel cancer. I can't seem to stop the flash backs. I did try counselling soon after he died, but she couldn't tell me what I wanted to hear..when he was coming home! I miss him so much, but after this length of time people seem to think I should be over it. So I paste on a smile and go about life as normaly as possible, while all the time I'm being eaten up inside.

Offline longedge

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Re: 2yrs9mths
« Reply #1 on: August 01, 2019, 11:24:10 PM »
Hi Gill - I still feel awkward about this, you ladies are much more at ease with emotions than we lads of a certain age I think   :hug: but it's a heart felt hug anyway.

We're both in the same situation I think although I'm a little further down the line than you ( I count the years,months and days as well). I realised some time ago that I just have to take each day as it comes. Some days I'm OK and others have a black cloud over them from waking up to going back to sleep.

I found that coming here helped me a lot in the past and I still look in most days. It won't be long I'm sure before you get more replies, probably a lot more helpful than mine, but my take on it all is that talking helps and this is a place where you can just say what you are feeling.
I'll never get over losing her and I used to think that eventually
I would learn to live with it - that's not happened yet.

        ~ I'm George by the way ~

Offline Karena

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Re: 2yrs9mths
« Reply #2 on: August 02, 2019, 12:32:40 PM »
Hi Gill sending you a welcome hug  :hug:
It is eight years since my husband died and i still miss hime every single day and i think it was about 4 years before i stopped thinking about the horrid days at the end of his life and started replacing them with much better ones about the whole of his life and out lives together.But although of course i miss him i am not unhappt like i was then, i thought about if there was such a thing as an afterlife or somehow meeting up again a reunion would be amazing but how does that conversation go after a while - what did you do with your life - nothing, ust mourned losing you wouldnt take very long, and maybe he would be a bit upset that i threw away my life after he faught so hard for his - so i pretty much decided if i couldnt find reasons to live life for me then i would live it for him - go back to doing things we enjoyed doing together do some of the ones we never got round too or that he would have chosen to do and i would probably have sat out on.
Grief left me even more anxious and socially inept than i had been before so this meant overcoming - or finding ways around the barriers that threw up -but it has got better the more i have done it. I tried to join things locally and it didnt work for me because they were the wrong things and joining something just for the sake of it, then putting myself through the social interactions it involved didnt work - but it has worked really well for others here, we are all different and we all find different paths.So i selected the barriers which prevented me doing things i actually wanted too - did free online courses which boosted confidence in my abilitys and lead to other things.
The point at which i was terrified dangling on a zip wire over a gorge in Africa. but looking at the rainbow in a waterfall - something i had wanted to see since i was a child and he had said i would one day was the point at which i realised it was worth it for me, but also when i felt he was with with me, he isnt waiting to have the conversation on the off chance we meet in another world  and even though i cant see or hear him there have been other occasions when i have felt that very strongly.

Traditional psychology focuses on us "letting go" other people think we should "move on and let go"  i  found a different theory called continuing bonds - because in a way we are afraid to let go of grief because we think it means letting go of the person we are grieving for but actually we dont need too ever let go of them, and although we also learn to live with grief and it no longer is the biggest part of us we can separate grief from the person we are grieving for so  my philosophy now, is move forward,and  take him with me, not as some-one missing from my life but as some-one still very much part of it just in different ways from when he was here in body.
Whether there is an afterlife or not,  i dont know but it helps me to feel better in this one to think there mat be something so nothing to lose  if there isnt. Whether its neurological and i am simply bringing up his memory i dont know, but again when those memorys are more positive ones it helps me to live life in a more positive way.

One thing i tried , to help me do that was,  If you imagine a deck of cards and put pictures on them - when you are holding a flash back card imagine putting it on the bottom and replace that visualisation with one of better times - to do that you need to collect those better cards and the more of them there are the longer it will be before the bad cards come back to the top -until eventually you have so many good cards you can just throw away the ones at the bottom and still have a full pack.

Offline Panda

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Re: 2yrs9mths
« Reply #3 on: August 02, 2019, 06:45:16 PM »
I only joined 24hrs ago and already I realise that is absolutely the web site for me. Thank you so much for your kind words and I'm sure I'll be back soon, if not daily.

Offline Emz2014

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Re: 2yrs9mths
« Reply #4 on: August 03, 2019, 08:36:51 AM »
Sending you a welcome hug gill  :hug: xx
Even the darkest night will end and the sun will rise. 
Hold on in there xx

Offline Karena

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Re: 2yrs9mths
« Reply #5 on: August 06, 2019, 11:15:58 AM »
come back as often as you want and on the better days when its the little things you miss - the chats the telling of the days events -what to have for tea - all those ordinary every day things we also have the every day general chat section its not the same but sometimes its exactly what we need.