How is it even possible?

I think I have a deeper understanding now of how people can get quite sick during their grieving process.

It’s relatively easy to just get on with life and keeping on ‘doing’, as per usual and yet everything feels remarkably different (and simultaneously the same). Biologically, physically, it is all so different. Mentally, emotionally - am I even the same person? My mind is processing information differently, my emotions move in ways so unpredictable.

So I get it. I can see how when grief is tucked away into the crevices and corners to collect dust and when we don’t give it the air time, the space to be wrung out dry that it will eventually fester, like a wet jacket shoved into the back of a dusty closet - soon to be covered in mould. Isn’t that the way with all of our human suffering? It must be felt.

We must hold space for the technicolour spectrum of our stories.

I am not sick. I am miraculously doing quite well, all things considered, but I can feel the tension, the contraction, the closing down, the suppression, the ache of it all - I can feel it building in my body. It’s making itself very known.

Don’t forget about me, says grief, don’t forget to feel me, ok? Please don’t forget otherwise I’ll have to knock on you a little louder.

Truly, the only thing that helps at the moment is to move my body and to sit in my grief. Not constantly, not always. Just enough to let the pressure out.

So I do, I sit, I touch on the ouchy parts. I breathe. I cry… big, fat, wet tears that seem to come from a never ending pool. I cry past the point of ‘that was a good cry’… I cry even when I wish I could stop crying.

If a wave of reflective sadness moves through me at 10:45pm - way past my bedtime - and when very time I close my eyes and attempt to ignore it it just rolls in stronger, I just pick myself up and sit somewhere quietly. Perhaps in front of the fire, which is the very place I went to when I get that phone call from my brother "(Claire, it’s… it’s Dad. He’s gone…”). And so I sit. And I say to grief - OK, I’m ready. And then my heart aches, and the emotion ripples and builds and waves. And sometimes it’s a choking cry, sometimes it’s just a sadness… sometimes it’s so much love breaking through that it physically catches my breath.

That latter part is important. Very.

Love is what we feel inside of grief - when we are willing enough to really be with it. Grief feels like a love that is so all encompassing and unconditional that our little human selves don’t know what to do with it.

Dad had previously shared (via a friend who is a medium) that my grief was like a wild fire - that it would burn bright and fast (perhaps not so fast in human, linear time!) And when it finally settled and new shoots of life were growing through and for me, that’s where he’d be. Waiting to walk with me as my guide through this life. Isn’t that just beautiful.

Very recently, during a session with my Pleiadean Lightwork Mentor, my father connected in again and shared that sometimes when our loved ones are trying to connect with us we miss the transmission because we are hit by a way of grief… but what we are really feeling is LOVE. Their unconditional, never-ending, all encompassing, eternal love.

He asked me to feel my grief, the wildfire of my grief as a burning love… what a gift. A gift I will endeavour to accept and to feel in every way I can.

And yet my human self asks but how will I live this life only to feel his love through grief and know that I will never see his half-little smirk at my youngest child cheeky comments.

Or that I will never hear him say - like a soft little teddy bear - “I love you” to my children, his beloved grandchildren.

Or that I’ll never, ever, feel his papery 87 year old hands again.

Or that no one, ever, will call me ‘Clairey’ with such affection, the way he used.

And all that being said, it blows my little human mind that it is possible that I can feel this much grief-love AND continue on with life just as it’s always been? How is it even possible to hold all of it at once. It is, because I am and so many of us have and will.

How is it possible that we can hold all of life - the grief, sorrow, suffering juxtaposed and layered with joy, laughter, love, play, routine, work. It’s a question that doesn’t need answering. Because I know - just as I know that my father is closer than ever before and that he is across worlds, time and dimensions - that we have the capacity for so much and that is precisely why we incarnated (and continue to do so) because it’s this full-spectrum, multi-faceted journey of LIFE that teaches, shapes and transforms the soul.

All my love

Claire x