What to do when remembering your loved one becomes entangled with sadness.

When navigating grief it can be a common pattern for ‘remembering’ to become filled with sadness.

Your connection and remembering become entwined with sadness and the two end up going hand in hand.

And soon, the only way to remember… is to feel sad. Which leaves you stuck.

You want to move forward. You want to feel happiness again.

But you also want to remember, which is entangled with sadness. So you loop around here for a while, circling without direction.

So lets explore the entanglement of memories of your loved one with grief and sadness. This is something that is common to women and can linger for a long time, weighing heavy.

I recall in my own journey, that I did not want to lose connection with my son. That I felt every step forward in my life, meant a step further away from him. That somehow his life would diminish, becoming a slow distant memory almost as if nothing had happened or he didn’t exist.

My greatest fear was that as time passed, I would lose the sense of connection that I had with him and I wanted his life to be important, to be remembered.

Unfortunately, as is common for many women who have the experience of never wanting to forget and always wanting to remain connected to your love one, somehow my connection with my son became entangled with the emotions of sadness and despair. The two became inseparably linked.

I found myself constantly looping back to sadness. Like comfortable pyjamas, I would slip into sadness and just live there. At least he was nearby.

Many of my friends and family were concerned about my signs of depression. However, the waves of sadness that would wash over me, were always a reminder of the connection with my son. I soon found myself almost nurturing this. With a background narrative of if I wasn’t sad perhaps I was no longer connected to him? If I found joy, would that be letting him go?

It’s a tangled web, the path of grief, loss and emotional regulation and well-being. Its a journey without a map and it can be dark and messy.

The wanting to stay connected.

The wanting to remember.

The never wanting to let go.

And soon those wants become entangled with the emotion of grief and sadness. And remaining connected and remembering fuses with remaining sad.

In my own journey of developing the Rise UP method, I too wrestled with the entanglement of sadness and my son‘s connection.

There are some simple steps forward that can help detangle this web in a way that allows you to honour your sense of infinite connection towards your loved one, without looping repeatedly back to sadness.

Firstly, finding the jewel inside and honouring that with a sense of infinite connection and gratitude can often be the way forward, when your connection to your loved one has become intertwined with grief and sadness.

The jewel inside is a label I have for the piece that remains forever in your heart that shines out. Perhaps not visible to others, but a deep sense within you. A connection and a gift that only you know.

Sometimes the jewel gets buried in the rubble. Covered with anger, sadness, resentment, despondency- all of the emotions that make the grief journey so tiring.

Uncovering that jewel can be the glimpse of hope, infinite connection and resilience that lights the pathway forward.

Questions to ask to find your own beacon of light are:

• What are my favourite most treasured parts of the love I have lost- how can I shine them out so they live on through me?
• What strengths do I now have as a result of my experiences and my connection to the love that has passed?
• What gifts do I now hold that I would never have experienced otherwise?
• What can I do to honour my loved one that brings joy or benefits others?
• What am I most grateful for as a result of my connection with the love I have lost?

Asking good questions helps uncover the unique gifts that you can hold in your heart, your own jewel within, that can help you Rise UP from sadness.

I hope that helps create some steps toward detangling your sadness from your loved one’s memory.

Like to learn more about the Rise UP Method?  Click here

There are many tools and resources that can help women through the three phases of grief. Watch more here on the phases of grief.

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