Overcoming Sadness and Grief

 It’s been a while since the last time I officially wrote anything for my blog, but the time has arrived that I feel the need to do so. I will, shortly, be writing articles (I hope) for the A-Z blogging challenge, held in April of each year and which are found in my other blog: An Seanchai. But for now, my purpose in writing is to overcome, in some measure, the feelings of grief that still assail me from time to time, even at seven years from Russ’ death.

As many of you who have read my blog in the past know, I belong to the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-Day Saints. We are encouraged to be as self-reliant as possible, in as many areas of our daily existence as possible. There are groups that teach things we need to know, because besides the spiritual aspect of our lives, there is also the temporal side.

Our Heavenly Father wants us to be happy during our life here on the Earth, and He wants to help us reach that goal. And to help us attain that goal, He has inspired our leaders to create a number of self-reliance groups that include: Building and Maintaining a Business, How to Find a Better Job, Emotional Resilience, etc. I have participated in the first two and am now engaged in the latter.

In last week’s lesson we talked about learning to cope with sadness and grief and the tumult of emotions that can arise from them. And among the things we talked about was — and this is the thing I can’t believe I didn’t think of myself — writing down our memories of the person or thing that we are mourning. I have so many happy and silly memories of Russ that they could fill a book on their own. And, unless we have a heart made of stone or ice, we all have feelings of sadness and mourn the loss of things or people or pets that we have lost through death or elsewise. It’s a part of being human. And there’s absolutely nothing wrong with it. It is my hope that through this exercise, I can help someone else in their struggles to overcome their grief and sorrow, as I work to overcome my own.

I thought that I’d like to start off with telling you how Russ and I met, and that will be in the next article.