Today’s blog prompt is “What is your mission?” For a long time, my mission was to simply to deal with my grief after Jeff’s death. Anyone who has dealt with grief knows that it is a massive mission — at first, getting through the days, then learning to live with a big hole in your life, then eventually becoming the person who can perhaps thrive despite the loss. Because the horrendous pain was an experience I’d never encountered before in books or movies or other people, my mission expanded to telling the truth about this sort of all-encompassing grief, to let other grievers know they weren’t alone, that grief was normal. When my grief became more manageable, my mission changed to telling those who were still grieving long after others think they should have “moved on,” that they are doing exactly the right thing, and that someday they will get to where they need to be.
My grief mission has come to an end. I no longer have an interest in resurrecting my pain to talk about it, to explain it, to lay myself bare. In fact, I’m to the point where I can’t handle any sort of grief, even the second-hand kind. Compassion overload apparently is a real thing.
A few days ago, I wrote about being — or not being — a contender (I Coulda Been a Contender). It seems the gist of the blog is that I am missing a sense of mission. Since I don’t really know what a mission is (though I do know when one thrusts itself upon me), I had to look up the word.
A mission is “the ultimate goal or purpose toward which one strives; one’s reason or motivation to continue existing, operating, or working.” At the moment I have no goal, no motivation to continue existing except the most basic — to survive the day as best as I can, to glean whatever good I can find and to try to gracefully glide past anything that’s not so good.
Now that I think of it, that’s not a bad mission!
What’s your mission?
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Pat Bertram is the author of Grief: The Inside Story – A Guide to Surviving the Loss of a Loved One. “Grief: The Inside Story is perfect and that is not hyperbole! It is exactly what folk who are grieving need to read.” –Leesa Healy, RN, GDAS GDAT, Emotional/Mental Health Therapist & Educator.
Bertram's Blog 