I'm so sorry to hear of the loss of both your partner, Peter and your younger brother, John, Karenmary. I can understand why you had reason to come and find us now. You have clearly been through a lot this last few years and a move to a new location too. All this must have been both heart-breaking and stressful and any loss turns your whole world upside down. It's a long difficult process to adjust to all the changes in your life that result from a loss and is sometimes hard to keep going under the strain of it all.
Don't worry about posting the way either of your loved ones passed away. Everyone here has lost loved ones in different ways, but we all feel the same kind of pain and go through similar feelings and meet the same kind of difficulties related to those events as a result. We understand how hard loss is and how hard the process of coming to terms with it is and how long it can take to accept it and to find a way to rebuild your life. You are not alone here.
I think all you can do is to find what helps and try in little ways to recover from all this. I found it helped to keep a journal of my thoughts and feelings each day. The act of writing things down does seem to help relieve the stress and get it out of your system a bit. My own loss also left me in a bit of a panic, so I found it also helped to make both a short-term and longer term plan for how I would cope and what I would concentrate on for the next year or so and almost two years on, still find I am sticking to it and that gives me more confidence and a direction to follow, which helps me feel better too. But something as simple as a walk in the park or having some flowers in a vase at home to look at also helped. You may or may not seek company, but an understanding friend to talk to can help too, or you may prefer to be alone. Either way, it is fine.
I found grief weighed me down and needed some relief from it, if only for a few hours a week, so I joined a class to go to a couple of times a week, in a subject that the person I had most recently lost, my mum, also took an interest in and enjoyed and that way, I felt I was doing this for both of us and that really helped me. I made some new friends there, a couple of whom had also experienced loss and understood what I was going through and that has helped, but also, it got me out of the house and gave me something to look forward to, so it counterbalances the sadness with something happier and enjoyable. I think you need that if you are to avoid being dragged into the abyss that grief can pull you into.
You never really lose the loved ones you have known and will always carry them with you in your heart, so you don't have to leave them behind. I think you do tend to have conversations with them in your head, when you might otherwise have turned to them for advice and can hear what they might have said to you, knowing them so well. I still do that out loud to their pictures at times! You are who you are partly due to their influence on your life and your personality, so you are, to a degree, part of the legacy they have left and you use the experience of having known them to make decisions about your own life, so they are still helping you, even though they are not physically here anymore.
Dealing with loss is a long and difficult process with ups and downs along the way, but you just have to keep trying to move forward. There is no time limit on it and no right or wrong way to cope. One day at a time. Just keep going. Best wishes to you..
PS I have moved your two posts under the same message topic, Karenmary. I hope you don't mind. It seemed to make more sense to do so, as they are both things that have affected you and related events you wished to post about. It that is not OK with you, I can switch them back again, but thought this would help, so that anyone wishing to reply would be able to read both posts in the one place and would be able to consider both when they reply. Hope that's OK. x
