“Just keep on living until you feel alive again.”

Drawing to illustrate the quote "Just keep on living until you feel alive again."

– Quote from ‘Call The Midwife’

 

Now, as stated, this is not a quote I have come up with myself, but it resonates so much, I wish I had.

It says ‘Hang in there – I know you are struggling right now, but please know that things will change. Keep going. Don’t give up.”

[By the way: I would argue that this is true, not just for grief, but for any challenging situation.]

When Martin died, I felt as though my life had stopped. My profile picture on Facebook was a black square. There was only emptiness. Sometimes I couldn’t feel anything at all. I was in complete shock. The first christmas after his death – with the children safely tucked up at my parents’ house I would like to add – I remember aimlessly wandering around the dark streets at night in the rain, feeling out of place and hopeless…

In those moments, it is so hard to imagine a carefree, happy laugh, or an excited giggle, an adventure of the good kind, or any happiness at all really. It’s hard to imagine ‘colour’ if that makes sense.

But it will come.

If you allow it to.

I also remember the guilt.

Guilt for being alive when his life had so cruelly been cut short.

Guilt for feeling happy.

Guilt for loving again.

What really helped me was something Dr Geoff Warburton said in his TEDx Brighton talk ‘The Adventure of Grief”:

“(…) Connecting to the flow of life is ultimately what will make us happy. Happiness, for the people I came across in my journey, was about the way they travel. It wasn’t some ‘end destination’, it wasn’t some place they reached when they ‘got over their grief’. It was more about how they continued to be open to their experience. (…)”

And, emotionally reflecting on his own feelings of guilt after his brother’s death in a car crash:

“We honour the dead more by choosing to live well.”

I couldn’t think of a more beautiful way to put it.

xxx

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