relationships | Bertram's Blog

Dealing with Myriad Characters

July 3, 2013 — Pat Bertram

It’s amazing how much I have forgotten about my work in progress, the one that’s been paused for the better part of three years. (I’ve been writing it on again and off again for six years, actually. Life and death have so often broken me away from the work, that it’s progressing on an average of 8,000 words a year. At this rate, it will be finished in three more years.)

During the first third of the book, my poor hero was mostly alone as he dealt with the affects of a world gone berserk, which created many writing challenges. It’s much easier to write with two characters so they can play off each other, butt heads, have dialogues, or whatever is necessary for the story.

The second part of the book presented an entirely different challenge — too many characters. I’m typing up a stray chapter, one I wrote three years ago, and it astonished me to count fifteen characters: my hero, his nemesis, three starfish-like aliens, plus ten supporting characters. Ouch.

Luckily, I’d done research on group dynamics shortly after I started writing this book, and so I was able to give each human an identifiable role in the group. As I found out, at times groups act like a single entity, so that also helps in dealing with myriad characters. As I wrote in On Writing: Characters and Group Mentality:

There are five stages of group development:

1. Coming together and finding roles
2. Defining the task
3. Disenchantment with the leader, each other
4. Cohesion, feeling like a team
5. Interdependence, acting like a team, becoming more than the sum of the parts.

Most groups unconsciously assign roles to the members, and once these roles have been assigned, tacit agreement maintains them. The most common group roles are: leader, seducer (wants to bewitch others), silent member, taskmaster, clown, victim, oppressor, conciliator, combatant, nurse, young Turk (wants to take over the leadership), the naïf, and the scapegoat.

Groups tend to isolate one person as the source of any conflict, whether warranted or not, and they deposit their negative feelings on that person. Because my hero keeps to himself, and because the others think he’s “teacher’s pet,” he becomes the scapegoat. I don’t think he cares, though, so if you don’t care, are you still the scapegoat? Either way, that’s the role the group has assigned him.

Well, the group didn’t assign him that role; apparently I did once upon a time. It should be interesting to see what other treasures I find as I rediscover this story.

***

Pat Bertram is the author of the suspense novels Light Bringer, More Deaths Than One, A Spark of Heavenly Fire, and Daughter Am I. Bertram is also the author of Grief: The Great Yearning, “an exquisite book, wrenching to read, and at the same time full of profound truths.” Follow Pat on Google+. Like Pat on Facebook.

Posted in culture, relationships, writing. Tags: character development, characters, group mentality, group roles, hero, scapegoat, stages of group development. 8 Comments »

Grieving For Grief

June 28, 2013 — Pat Bertram

A woman who lost her life mate/soul mate around the same time as I lost mine told me about an insignificant event that briefly stirred up her low-lying grief, and then she said, “I wonder if I were grieving for grief.”

It sounds strange, but the truth is, we do grieve for grief. Grief for a spouse or a soul mate is so all-consuming, that it fills, in a strange sort of way, the hole they left in our life. Grief, as hard as it is, makes us feel, which makes us feel alive. Grief keeps us connected, if only by pain, to our mates. Grief reminds us that we once loved, and perhaps were loved in return. Grief gives us a glimpse of the vastness of life and the void of death and makes our existence feel important, makes us feel important. When grief passes, we have none of those things, just an emotional and spiritual emptiness. And so we grieve for the loss of our grief. Eventually, I hope, we will find something to replace grief, as grief replaced our love, but who knows what that will be and when or if it will come.

One of the tasks of grief is to help disconnect us from the past so that we can embrace the future while living as fully in the present as possible without being stuck forever in the half-life of loving someone who is dead. Then, of course, we have the problem of disconnecting ourselves from the grief. Disconnecting from grief is a much easier task, of course, since we don’t really thrive on pain (I don’t, anyway. Never have been much of a masochist), but still, whether we welcomed it or not, grief does become our life. It’s how we connect to the world and ourselves. It’s how we move past the trauma of losing the one person we loved more than anyone else in the world. It’s how we bridge the gap between the meaninglessness of death and finding new meaning in life.

I can see that as my grief is waning, I am disconnecting from my life mate/soul mate. Or maybe it’s the other way around, as I’m disconnecting from him, my grief is waning. Either way, I’ve come to the realization that although it seemed we were connected soul to soul, my mate and I are/were two separate people. For a while we traveled the same road, but now we are on separate journeys. After he was gone, I had grief as a constant companion, urging me forward, but now, with the waning of grief, I see the bleakness of myself alone, fading, dying.

But that’s not all there will be, nor is it necessarily the truth. I have years, maybe decades of life in me still. It’s just a matter of finishing the tasks of grief, of grieving briefly for the loss of grief, then heading out on the highway of life and seeing what comes my way. Sounds easy and life-affirming, doesn’t it? I wonder if the coming leg of the journey will be as hard as all the rest.

***

Posted in culture, grief, life, relationships. Tags: grief for a spouse, grieving for grief, half-life of grief, loss of a soul mate. 6 Comments »

Serial Killers and Sociopaths

June 22, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Despite fads and new genres, serial killers endure as a favorite villain for writers and readers alike, though I lost my taste for such books years ago. For one thing, too many writers use killing as a cheap way of escalating tension, with each murder upping the ante. For another thing, too many writers perpetuate the serial killer myth of the white, middle-class, intelligent, charming male about thirty-five years old.

Dr. Katherine Ramsland, a forensic psychologist, debunks this stereotype in a guest post she did for this blog: Serial Killers and the Writers Who Love Them: Facts about Popular Myths. As Ramsland points out, “Serial killers are not all alike. They’re not all male. Some have been as young as eight or older than fifty. They’re not all driven by sexual compulsion. They’re not all intelligent, nor even clever – often, they’re just lucky. They’re not all charming. A single killer may choose different weapons or methods of operation, although they will tend to stay with whatever works best. Even with rituals, the basis of a ‘signature,’ they often experiment and change things. They might be profit-driven, in search of thrill or self-gratification, or compelled by some other deep-seated desire, fear or need. Occasionally, serial murder is about revenge or it’s inspired by a delusion. In most cases, the killer does not wish to be stopped or caught. Yet a few do intentionally undermine themselves or stop of their own accord. Some rare killers have even professed remorse or killed themselves.”

Far more fascinating to me are the sociopaths who don’t kill. Some psychologists estimate that there are thirty thousand psychopaths who are not serial killers for every one who is. (Some professionals use “sociopath” and “psychopath” interchangably as I am doing and some argue there is a difference, but oddly, no one seems to agree on what those differences are.)

So who are these non-killing psychopaths? Your neighbor, perhaps, or your mother-in-law. Probably many politicians and scientists. Possibly even you.

(In A Spark of Heavenly Fire, Peter Jensen says: “I have a theory, entirely unproven, that a lot of psychopaths gravitate to the sciences, biology especially, where they can hide behind that famed scientific detachment. They can also torture animals in the name of science, and no one calls them insane.”)

Even if you don’t write crime fiction, familiarity with the sociopathic personality can help you create dynamic characters and even interesting dialogue. For example, sociopaths frequently use contradictory and illogical statements such as “I never touched her, and anyway, she wanted it.”

A sociopath has difficulty connecting to others, though people often like them. They can be charming, glib, witty, and use captivating body language. (Sounds like a politician, doesn’t it?) Because of their impulsiveness, need for excitement, no need to conform to societal standards, poor behavior controls, and lack of responsibility, they can be fun companions, but because they lack empathy, conscience, and remorse, they can never truly connect with anyone.

One characteristic that keeps a sociopath from being a good fiction hero is that in fiction heroes need to change during the course of the novel, and sociopaths have solid personalities that are extremely resistant to outside influences. But, being the manipulative creatures that they are, they can make us believe they have changed.

In a relationship, such manipulation might be intolerable, but in fiction, it makes for a interesting character, even if the character isn’t a killer.

***

Posted in books, culture, relationships, writing. Tags: Dr. Katherine Ramsland, popular myths about serial killers, psychopath, serial killer, serial killer profile, sociopath. 7 Comments »

Is Our Grief Necessary to the Dead?

June 21, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I talked to my deceased life mate/soul mate while I was out walking in the desert this morning. I apologized for keeping him tied to me with my grief, told him I hadn’t meant to shed so many tears for him or grieve for so long, and explained that much of my grief came from somewhere so deep inside that I had no conscious control over it.

I told him I was doing okay, so perhaps I wouldn’t be bothering him as much, and I wished him well.

I continued wandering, wondering about the incomprehensibleness of grief, and the thought came to me that perhaps such profound grief is a beacon, as necessary to the dead as it is to the living.

During the last weeks of my mate’s death, he was often agitated and confused due to both the cancer in his brain and the morphine he needed to control his pain. Once he woke screaming. I went to calm him, but he was frantic. He couldn’t remember who he was. “Do you remember me?” I asked. He studied my face, nodded his head, and immediately started to calm down. A few minutes later, he’d recovered enough to remember who he was.

What if after he died, he felt as horribly and as bewilderingly amputated as I did? What if his new world felt as alien as mine did? What if my grief, so incredibly powerful, served as a beacon the same way my presence did that night? What if my grief showed him where I was and gave him something familiar to focus on until he could get his bearings?

We are indoctrinated by religion and by stories of near death experience into believing that death is an immediate rebirth into the light, but no one knows the truth of it. (Many people who have near death experiences do not see the light, but see darkness. Some people whose heart stops have no experiences. The truth is, the brain releases powerful psychedelic chemicals during trauma that can induce such mystical experiences. Many people who took LSD or DMT and had good trips returned to themselves believing they had died and experienced God and the after life. But although many people think they know the truth of it, no one on this side of death can know for sure.)

Someone who died abruptly might not know what happened. Someone who died slowly but in confusion and disorientation might not know what happened. This sort of thing isn’t unheard of; it occurs here on Earth. A person who is given sight after being blind since birth often cannot immediately see except a fuzzy light. The brain needs to be trained so that it knows what it is seeing. Perhaps the newly dead also need to be trained to see through their new eyes. And if so, the grief of a loved one could provide a beacon until they get their bearings.

The desert is known for inducing mysticism in people who wander those empty spaces, so there could be some truth to this. On the other hand, it was very hot, and I might have had sunstroke. Either way, the idea of grief being a beacon is an interesting concept, one that will stew in my brain pan for a while.

***

Posted in culture, grief, relationships. Tags: death as amputation, death as rebirth, do the dead feel grief, grief as a beacon, what happens when we are dead. 9 Comments »

The Unchanging Face of Grief

June 17, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Sometimes it amazes me how little things have changed over the course of the three years of grief since the death of my life mate/soul mate. The pain, of course, has dissipated significantly, and I seldom have the falling-elevator feeling of panic at the thought that he is gone. Even the thought of his being dead at the moment isn’t making my stomach churn (though I still don’t like it and never will).

In fact, right now, I’m not feeling much of anything — no great sadness, no inclination to tears, no inclination to anything, if the truth be told. Because of this, I’ve been procrastinating about writing today’s blogpost: upgrading a defunct blog, learning a bit more about some of the widgets wordpress offers. I finally procrastinated so much that I ran out of time and decided to do an excerpt from my grief book as a fill in. And guess what? Exactly three years ago today, I felt the same way as I do now. Just drifting. Marking time. Wandering in the desert. Hoping . . .

Excerpt from Grief: The Great Yearning

Day 83, Grief Journal

I’m not doing much. Just drifting. Getting through the days. Pretending to be real. I hope the rest of my life isn’t going to be just marking time like this. It sounds . . . feeble. Mostly I’m babying myself, as if I’m recovering from a long illness. And I am—a soul sickness.

I spend hours every day wandering in the desert. I’m as restless as Jeff was at the end, and walking seems to be the only thing that keeps me pacified. The past couple of weeks have felt like a perfect summer from childhood that was always warm and sunny, at least in memory. It’s been hot here, of course, and windy, but I’ve been roaming like a child newly freed from restrictions.

I hope I am going somewhere. I hope I’m growing, developing, doing something besides stagnating, which is how I feel.

Click here to find out more about Grief: The Great Yearning

***

Posted in culture, grief, life, relationships. Tags: grief and loneliness, grief and marking time, grief journal, grief work, Grief: The Great Yearning. 9 Comments »

Live Like It’s Heaven On Earth

June 16, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I came across this saying earlier today (apparently it was written by William Watson Purkey, but now is in the public domain. The word art is mine, however). It caught my attention because I’ve been struggling to figure out how to live now that I am uncoupled due to the death of my life mate/soul mate.

Most of this saying doesn’t pertain to me. Occasionally, I dance around the living room by myself, a sort of dance therapy, as a way of helping me feel lighter in spirit. And a couple of weeks ago I danced to the light of the moon. (It seemed appropriate at the time.)

But I never sing, seldom even listen to music except during my brief stints of dance therapy, and at the moment, I am fresh out of people to love. Well, family and friends, of course, but no one special to plan a future with. Perhaps someday
. . . or not. Life gives, and life takes away, and I am learning to deal with that.

I don’t believe in heaven, either, especially not the harp and clouds sort of patriarchal afterlife so often touted by religions, but something about that last sentence caught my imagination. Live like it’s heaven on earth. So what does that mean to me? Live with abandonment, saving nothing for another life. Live joyfully. Live.

I have no idea how to do that, but it seems a good basis for planning a new life.

Besides, if life and death are simply different facets of being, then this is heaven on earth even though it so often feels like hell.

***

Posted in being me, culture, life, relationships. Tags: dance like there's nobody watching, live like it's heaven on earth, love like you'll never be hurt, sing like there's nobody listening, William Watson Purkey. 8 Comments »

My Punctuated Life of Equilibrium

June 15, 2013 — Pat Bertram

I never understood evolution, especially Darwin’s version of how it happens. I mean, a bat is always a bat. Bats beget bats and have been begetting bats for millions of years. So how does a bat become something else? And how did something else become a bat? Stephen Jay Gould’s idea of punctuated equilibrium is the only evolution theory that ever made sense to me since it mirrored what I knew — that bats always beget bats until . . . they don’t.

Punctuated equilibrium says (at least the way I understand it) that everything exists in a state of equilibrium, with very few evolutionary changes except on a local level. (By “local level” I mean within a species. A species of creatures that becomes separated by a river, for example, will undergo minor changes as time goes on, with those individuals most able to adapt to the new environment surviving to procreate. But still, the adapted creature is recognizably the same species as its forebears.) These vast times of stasis are occasionally punctuated with relatively short (on a cosmic scale) periods of genetic changes, and then things settle down into another long, long, long, period of equilibrium.

This is what my life feels like — long, long, long periods where everything is static, and then brief but frenetic periods of change before stasis sets in once more.

During all the years when my life mate/soul mate was dying, our lives seemed stagnant. We did things of course, but there were no major changes, nothing to yank us out of our torpidity. Day after day, year after year, he got sicker and weaker and I became more emotionally anesthetized since I could not bear what was happening to him and I couldn’t do anything to help him get better.

As the years passed, I felt as if it would always be that way — he dying, me struggling to live. And then one day, things changed. He bent down to pick something up, and a horrendous pain shot through him. He bore the pain as long as he could — three unbelievably agonizing weeks — because he knew that any drug strong enough to kill the pain would also destroy him. And it did. When he finally got on morphine, it made him disoriented. Sometimes he didn’t remember me, and sometimes he didn’t remember himself.

I hunkered down for a long siege since the doctor said he had three to six months to live.

And just like that, three weeks later, after one last breath, the long years of stasis were over. I went through a few months of rapid changes, getting rid of his stuff, putting mine in storage, moving in with my father to take care of him.

These past years of grief have masked the truth. That my life is still basically the same. Stagnant. Living with a man (my father this time) who is declining. Struggling to find a way to survive live despite the situation. I’ve agreed to stay to the end, which could be years, and I’m okay with that. (Designated Daughter, don’t you know.)

The end of this stage of equilibrium will be punctuated with another brief but frenetic period of change as I adjust to the new situation of having no one but me to be responsible for. And then . . .

I’m hoping to figure a way out of this punctuated equilibrium of mine, maybe find a way to incorporate small but steady changes to punctuate my future and keep things from becoming one long run-on sentence, to keep me ever-evolving until the inevitable period is put on the end of my life.

Of course, this is easy to say. It’s harder to do. No matter what we plan, life scatters punctuation marks where it will.

***

Posted in being me, culture, life, relationships. Tags: dealing with someone who is dying, designated caregiver, designated daughter, evolution, life changes., punctuated equilibrium. 4 Comments »

Grief Work

June 9, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Grief work after the death of a spouse or anyone who makes your life worth living encompasses many tasks, from the simple task of getting out of bed in the morning to the complicated tasks of arranging for funeral services and dealing with financial matters.

As time goes on, the tasks of grief seem to increase, especially the emotional, mental, and spiritual tasks. We need to work through the pain, adjust to the absence of our loved one, find ways and reasons to continue living despite the absence, realize we each have our own path in life, remember them with joy not just sadness. (These might not be tasks so much as the natural progression of grief, but they all fall under the category of “grief work.”)

There are the horrendous tasks of dealing with the loved one’s effects, clearing out the things they no longer have any use for. Sometimes this particular bit of grief work can take years. Although I disposed of most of my life mate/soul mate’s things, I still have items I cannot get rid of, either because he asked me to keep them or because getting rid of them is still unthinkable after Untitled more than three years. For example, I can’t get rid of his keys, eyeglasses, and wallet. Something in me balks at that, as if he still has use of such things. Especially ridiculous are his car keys. I donated his car to hospice, but kept a set of keys. I just can’t get rid of them.

And then there are the self-imposed tasks, the ways each of us find to honor the end of our shared life. For me, this self-imposed task is watching movies. Think it’s easy? No way!

Long ago, when we realized that we were renting the same movies over and over again because we couldn’t find anything better, he started taping movies for us. Started out with movies for us to watch together, and then expanded into movies he liked but I didn’t. As he got sicker and more housebound, he occupied his time by taping TV movies and television shows by hand so he could cut out the commercials.

There were more than a thousand tapes, some of them with a full six hours of movies or shows. Many of these tapes I had never watched, but during the past two-and-a-half years, I have been watching these tapes, sorting out the ones I have no interest in, keeping the ones that I like or that remind me of special occasions. I started with the tapes he made at the end, the ones I had never seen, and they were painful to watch — so many of them dealt with people who were dying or people who had to find a new way of living after the death of a spouse. It’s almost as if he were leaving me a message telling me to get on with my life.

Even more painful is when I reached the tapes that we always watched together. As I watch each of them, I am aware that the last time I saw the movie, he was by my side. I remember the things we said, the looks we gave each other, the connection we felt. These once-loved movies now seem dull and bland as if a vital spark is missing. And it is missing. He is missing.

I’ve almost worked my way through all the tapes, and I have a hunch that this particular self-imposed task is prolonging my grief since they connect me to the past and at the same time make me aware that the past is gone forever.

Despite all this grief work, there are two things I will never be able to deal with. I will always hate that he is dead. And I will always miss him.

***

Posted in culture, grief, life, relationships. Tags: dealing with loss, death of a spouse, grief tasks, grief work, honoring the dead, tasks of grief. 7 Comments »

What to do When Grief Support Group Members Never Leave

June 5, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Two years ago, I Got Kicked Out Of My Grief Support Group. It’s been bugging me lately, thinking about how traumatic that whole situation was (the facilitator even told me if I ever came back, he’d call the cops. Sheesh.). But today I finally got my say. Not to him, of course — he’s long out of my life — but to another facilitator who found my blog and wanted to know if I had any suggestion about how to deal with a group when it turns social, when the members hang around for two to three years without moving beyond the group.

This is my response to her:

I am so glad you asked! I’ve had a lot of time to think about that group, how good it was for me and how badly it ended, and what an idiot that facilitator was. Truth be told, he was a preacher and not a grief counselor, and he had no experience with support groups, which makes the whole situation even more upsetting. He had no business running the group.

It was a small group. At the most, there were fourteen people, but generally only six to ten. Two old ladies who had been coming to the group for three years had no friends or resources and they came to be around people once a week. One of those women suffered a significant loss each of those three years, and so had every right to still come, regardless of the reason. The other old woman was gradually losing her hearing, her sight, her autonomy, all of which needed to be grieved. The rest of us ranged from one month to fourteen months into our grief. Yes, we bonded, and occasionally we went out to lunch together, but we weren’t a social group. We were there for one reason only. To find support with our own kind. There was no one else to talk to about our problems with grief.

I especially bonded with one of the newest widows who had lost her husband a year after I lost mine. Her experiences mirrored mine, and I knew what she was going through. I could see it in her thousand-yard stare. She would look to me for answers to her questions because she knew I had been there and could understand. The facilitator hated this. He’d read a couple of articles about the Kubler-Ross stages of grief, and tried to fit everything anyone said into that grief model, even though it wasn’t at all what this woman was experiencing. He hated that I had a different perspective than he did. (He was still married, often talked about how supportive his wife was, and didn’t have a clue that one of the things we were grieving was that lack of such support.) And he hated that I printed out my blogs that showed the new woman what I had been going through. As I said, he was ignorant of support groups and didn’t understand that it was the nature of a group for the “older” members to help the newer ones, to be co-moderators in a way. And seeing how the newly bereft are dealing with their grief helps the older ones see how far they have come. This is why it’s important to have everyone in all stages of grief to be in the same group rather than to separate them out into special groups.

If most of the people in your group have been there for two to three years, you do have a problem. If you have no new members, you can do what my group did — cancel it for three to four weeks while everyone searches their conscience to see if they still needed the group. If it is not feasible to cancel the group for a while because of newly bereft members, it would be better to talk to each person individually, asking how they are dealing with their stage of grief, ask them what they want from the group and how you can help them move beyond the group.

Or you can cancel the group for three to four weeks, but still continue with the newest members during that time, saying you need to give the newly bereft special attention. (The people who have been around a long time should respect that — they themselves had once been so bereft.)

The newly bereft should never be penalized by long-term members. Those first weeks and months are so horribly painful that sometimes the only way to survive is through the support of a group. They are the ones who need special consideration.

Other things you can try:

When new people come to the group, focus on the new people. Have each group member introduce themselves to the new person, tell them who they lost and how, and how long ago it’s been. Then have the new member tell his or her story. Focus on the new member. Let the new member talk as long as s/he wants while the others keep their mouths shut. They all had their opportunity to tell their stories.

Make the group more focused. Set up a specific question, and have people answer only that question, starting with the newly bereft. Making sure the newest people get their say first in case there is not enough time for everyone to talk. (You can get some sort of “cards” with topics and choose a separate topic each time.)

Set up the group like a grief-orientation class. When I first started with the group, it was set up as a ten-week class, each class focusing on a different aspect of grief. When one set of classes was finished, the series began again. Gradually, the older members get bored with the repetition and leave the group.

Have the members only address the moderator or the person who is telling their story, not each other.

Make sure only one person talks at a time. If any of the long-time members have side conversations, ask them to take the conversation outside.

Do not allow any conversation that is not strictly grief oriented. Do not let anyone but new members (who desperately need to talk) to monopolize the group.

If it sounds harsh to focus on new members and pretty much ignore the members that have been there for two to three years, keep in mind that at these later stages of grief, vocalizing isn’t as important as it is at the beginning. In the group I was in, most of us who had been there a while had no real need to talk about our grief. It had all been said. But we did need the comfort of being with our own kind. (And in my case, I needed the comfort of passing on what we had learned so that all my pain didn’t go to waste.)

Many in the later stages find just as much comfort by listening. And if they don’t, if they only want to talk (or talk among themselves), then they don’t belong in the group.

To give you the short answer to your question: drastically restructure the group.

I hoped this helped.

Let me know if I can be of further assistance.

***

Posted in grief, How to, life, relationships. Tags: bereavement group, grief support group, when grief support groups get too social. 10 Comments »

Three Years and 68 days of Grief

June 2, 2013 — Pat Bertram

Today is the three-year anniversary of the day I left our home behind to come look after my then 93-year-old father. I still yearn to go home at times, but not back to the house — back to Jeff, my life mate/soul mate. He was my home. Still, leaving that house was a physical wrench. It was where we had spend two decades together. It is where we were living when he died. It’s where I endured the worst day of my life.

Although I no longer have the gut-wrenching, breath-taking, soul-shattering pain of those first terrible months after Jeff’s dath, I am still amazed how many of the feelings are the same as at the beginning.

Exactly three years ago today, I wrote in my grief journal:

Sometimes I think I’m dramatizing this whole situation, making a big deal out of a natural occurrence, then grief swallows me and I know Jeff’s death and my reaction to it is real.

I’m almost ready to leave, to start the next phase of my life. Will I be happy as my sister suggested? Will things come together for me as Jeff said? Will I stagnate during this transitional phase or will I find a new creativity, a new focus?

I feel like a fledgling being pushed from the nest with no idea of how to use my wings. Whether I look forward to the change or look back in longing, whether I drag my feet or wing it, I’m leaving here. Alone.

I have many doubts and fears, but despite them, I hope I will run to meet my destiny. And if there is no destiny? If there is no happiness for me? Well, I’ll accept whatever comes, both good and bad, with courage.

Today, I still am dealing with doubts and fears, still wondering if there is a destiny to run to meet, still wondering if I will ever be happy, or if this is the way I will always feel. So far, I have not yet found a new focus, though I am trying to fish for life, trying to do new things, to go new places, to be spontaneous.

My life is bound by death, it seems. First my brother’s death, then my mother’s, then Jeff’s, and now . . . Well, my father isn’t near death, but he is declining. Death is not a good way to live. At least not for me. I don’t know how people deal with all this loss. Well, yes, I do — with courage.

Click here to find out more about Grief: The Great Yearning

***