hugs to all grieving on this New Day

[femmedem]

4. I walked a local trail every day for a year after my fiance died. This was decades ago.

Somehow it helped to see the trail in every kind of weather: sunny, warm, windy, rain, snow. It steadied me. Especially when the weather was bad, I'd focus on caterpillars taking such a long time to cross a path or birds huddled in the cold. It taught me that all living creatures--animals and plants--have their struggles, that there was nothing unique or unfair about mine or my fiance's.

I remember that it was hard to have casual conversations with people. It was as if I was looking at them from behind blurry glass or from underwater. We were existing in different worlds.

You sound as if you are an experienced hiker and won't take chances. Maybe this is just what you need. But I worry that if you are alone for that long, you won't have anyone to turn to and your sadness might deepen. Again, I don't know you and we are all different. But back when I was lost, nearly suicidal, and reading everything I could get my hands on about bereavement, I read that in that first brutal year of grief, people usually shouldn't make major changes in their lives.

I hope that if you take a year to hike, that you will emerge feeling confident in your own abilities, connected to the larger rhythms of life and death, that you'll have the flexibility to come back home if things start to go awry, and that you will feel connected to him and feel your beloved everywhere, as I did, even in the air that you breathe, which contains molecules that once were part of him.

Much love to you. It will get better. You are in the very worst of it now. I promise it will get better.