Being Positive After Loss - A New Year's Resolve

I don't make New Year's resolutions. I learned long ago that they are good intentions with lousy follow-through. I may be a creature of some routine, but I am not a creature of habit. I don't get up at the same time every morning (it varies from 3am to 8:30am), but I do try to start work by 9am. This, of course, may mean eating breakfast at the dining table around 4am or sitting at my computer at 9:30. I recently changed how/where I put on my socks and shoes.

Some of this comes from moving a lot, both as a child and an adult, being forced to find new routines. Part of it is that I'm probably have some form of ADD. Focus has always been huge issue for me, more so as I get older.

And much more so in the last year.

Yep. Almost a year. Rachel died February 19th.

For the past year, I've become increasingly negative toward the world, and my responses on social media more biting. Took me awhile to see it. Took me even longer to understand it. Yes, it's been a bitter year for many people. We've lost a lot of people we admired and cared about. Some people are facing an elected president they despise with an icy resolve. Global events have been wearing and wearying.

But my turn to the bitter had a more intimate source.

After the initial burst of grief and numbness, I re-entered the world. I look normal. I mostly act normal. I'm not one to sit around on a stump and blubber. I go out with friends. I have good times.

Then the bitterness pops up, sometimes barely under control. In fact, I was with a friend yesterday and realized, too late, how negative I'd been all day.

The root? I'm still sad. Unrelentingly sad. A dark sadness that erupts in shower sobbing sessions, or overflows of tears if I dwell a little too long on the fact that my daughter is dead and I'll never see her again here. And for me, this is a stage that I'd prefer to keep private. If I don't talk about her, it's because I can't. Not now.

Parents who've lost children warned me about this stage. The stage when the excruciating grief is intermittent and awkward. When it can change your basic personality, if you don't stay aware. So...it has; and I am.

So my resolve is to stay aware and challenge myself. To refuse to let the numbness take over. To accept the sadness but not to surrender. To let productivity carry me forward and upward. To put a challenge in front of myself every day to achieve just a little be more along the way. To start each day as a blank page to be filled not with routine duties but new and embracing ways of living, working, and worship.

Here's hoping it's one habit I can keep.