Day Six
Touching into your grief can be brutal. Even when the pain never leaves you, sometimes purposely turning to face it can be exceptionally hard.
So today, let’s focus on kindness
“For all you have been through, for all you have seen, kindness“
“Let me be to my sad self hereafter kind.” – Peter Pouncey, Rules for Old Men Waiting: A Novel
What would it mean to offer kindness to yourself in your grief? What would kindness look like?
How do you, or how would you, “be to my sad self hereafter kind”?
Dear Dad,
Kindness takes many shapes these days and it’s 1000x more complex than I ever thought before. I don’t know if I would have ever said that sitting with someone and making sandcastles while they chatted was kindness… that telling someone you wanted them to have time for themselves was kindness. I mean, it’s not to say that those things aren’t kind. They are… but they aren’t the things that would’ve come to mind first.
Kindness to oneself. Something I think you struggled with… and perhaps passed on.
In the last year… the overarching theme for my own journey has been acceptance. Not the ‘5th stage of grief’ kind, but the kind where I look at myself objectively. My emotions, physical feelings, body, mind, and spirit. I take all of it in, the good, the bad, the ugly. I acknowledge that it isn’t all good, that there are areas I need to work on. I own that. I congratulate myself on the parts that have improved. Then as uncomfortable and as unnatural as it feels, I accept every part of it. I accept it, validate it, and deem it okay.
It sounds easy when I write it.
It’s not.
It takes every fiber I have left sometimes, to not assassinate my strength of character for the tears, the selfish moments, and the irrational fears. It takes every inch of space in my body to muster one more deep breath, so I can close my eyes. It takes every last pinch of willpower to not allow myself to rush past the uncomfortable parts, to walk with it and not run.
In the end, I know that I will be okay. Someday, I won’t have to struggle to accept where I am in my grief. And when that day comes, that will be okay too.
I think my biggest hope is that you were kind to yourself in the end.
You earned it.
I miss you
Cassie
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