Gratitude Practice 2020 Day 74: Grief Research…blech…

Can't really think of too many other topics that will quickly clear a room quicker or faster than G R I E F.

Blech. Nobody wants to talk about grief let alone admit that we may all be wrestling our way through a giant heaping pile of it. Chances are if you are a human being roaming on planet Earth these days you are neck deep in this stuff and nobody wants to talk about it. Because it's hard. It's messy. It's uncomfortable. And acknowledging it means we must have big sticky complicated inter-related feelings and nobody wants any of those, right?

Today, gratitude arrived early this morning in my social media feed when this article was posted by my seventh grade locker partner and life long friend, Barbara Bryner Gill. My deep seeded nerd tendencies and a handful of rocky years have actually led me down a long long research rabbit hole on both grief and its companion process resilience. While this research was not entirely new to me it's message and timing and meaning sure made a difference this morning and I've thought about it all day long. Might be something to feather into your reading que if you are finding it a bit hard to navigate life as we know it.

Grateful for super brave, smart, articulate researcher who gather, organize and share information about the messy complicated process of loving and losing. Grateful to be reminded of the cyclical bending and breaking and binding process that is a foundational and unavoidable part of the human experience. Grateful for knowledge that normalizes the struggle of surviving not just ourselves but all of the things that are out of our control. Grateful for good friends who are vulnerable enough to share what is hard and how they are rallying. And grateful for grief...it's such an awful unwanted super invasive always stays too long at the party yet incredibly profound teacher and refiner and life stretcher. May it come quickly, may it do it's work swiftly and educate us kindly and then ever so politely get the hell out of our lives...at least for long enough for us to catch our breath. Thanks, for sharing this Barb....I really needed to read this.