Family and Friends Moving On

[Deb and Pat]

28 minutes ago, Marg M said:

Deb, we don't all have the same situations, for sure.  The only thing most of us have in common is we grieve.  But you see, I had 54 years of marriage, two children, three grandchildren and three great grandchildren.  Lots of family friction in my family, always has been, but lots of already lifetime problems held and defeated, drug addiction, alcoholism, a marriage that was a wonderful marriage (the last about 30 years), but we got married in 1961.  I was not yet 19, he was just a few days from 21.  I had never been away from home but knew I could not go back and we did a lot of terrible things to each other, but grew up with our children.  So, every relationship is not the same.  Ours could have been destroyed by things we did, but it wasn't.  Some had wonderful marriages the whole time they were married, magical ones for more years than ours.  

I wish you the best and know your stepson is by your side and that is wonderful.  The girls will either come around, or they won't.  Do not know the circumstances, but you still have family and family can be wonderful, and I would not want to try to live without any of mine, but I would like to kinda lasso them ever so often and put them in a corral.  

It is the grief we all share.  Billy was my best friend.  We do what we can to honor their memory.  I am not far enough along that I don't hurt often.  Just this morning I thought he was on the other side of me, but I jumped up as fast as a 74-year-old woman can jump and went and made coffee (which he would have already had fixed for me to just flip the switch, then I would have brought his coffee to bed to him when he got ready to get up.  (Retired, and he would read sometimes to at least 2:00 a.m.) so he was not a morning person.

Here I go again, another word salad.......sorry.  I could talk about Billy forever.  My story on FB today was our various jaunts throughout the Arkansas backroads and rivers and creeks.  

How wonderful.  Hey I like salad so tell me some of your stories - hearing about others in a way I cannot explain really helps. 

Deb

[kevin]

Deb and Pat,....Welcome to club Grief, a place no one wants to be  , but a home we have all found....interesting quote from Robert Frost  in  three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on......

[Margm]

I used to write stories on FB for my friends.  I told about days gone by and old family reunions, I told stories from my grandma's book she wrote for the grandchildren, I wrote stories about growing up in a small milltown in the 1940's, 50's, 60's, and just stories my friends liked to hear. (Most had grown up with me.) I don't need to get started, cause I don't shutup.  I would always have Billy read them and he loved them because he was the main character in most of them and he was a ham.  I wrote of our RV adventures and misadventures, but they were never sad.  After he left I swore I would not write unless it could be uplifting.  I tried a few times but my spark was gone.  My proofreader had left.  Today, I wrote of memories of places I cannot go back to now, but it wasn't sad.

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.” ― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

I was fishing at the top of a rocky cliff like this when I snagged a huge bass. Pulling it up, it naturally got knocked back into the water. I was not disappointed, the fun was in catch and release, it had just released itself. We saw it, it was huge. I have not seen Billy get so aggravated at the loss of a fish. It was funny to me. This is the Mountain Fork River (I think) that runs below Mena. Not our picture. While we lived in Arkansas for close to 20 years, we took advantage of the wilderness. Just on the edge of Mena was a park that had a trail that was rigorous. We walked that trail with our trekking sticks many times. You had to have a walking stick because it was a terribly unsteady trail. I saw my first mulberry tree in years and years. My Mammaw had had a huge one when I was a little girl.

The most beautiful wildernesses this side of NM and Colorado, we were on nearly every day. There was a wilderness that crossed the border of the two states. The trail was about five miles long and we walked it and back. Sometimes, most times, we never saw another person, but the little creeks that led into the Ouachita, Cossatot, Caddo, Mountain Fork and Poteau Rivers, we found with no footprints of modern man. Never found an arrowhead though. I looked. Never have found one and we walked places that you knew only the Native Americans had trod. (At least in my vivid imagination).

Those memories are in the past, won't happen again, but still are fresh enough to enjoy. It was a pleasant time in life. The wilderness is important, as Stegner said, "even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in."

 

[kayc]

10 hours ago, Marg M said:

Those memories are in the past, won't happen again, but still are fresh enough to enjoy.

I've come to appreciate the memories we have, maybe in a way, all the more so for knowing they won't happen again this side of heaven.

[Dr Lenera]

10 hours ago, Marg M said:

I used to write stories on FB for my friends.  I told about days gone by and old family reunions, I told stories from my grandma's book she wrote for the grandchildren, I wrote stories about growing up in a small milltown in the 1940's, 50's, 60's, and just stories my friends liked to hear. (Most had grown up with me.) I don't need to get started, cause I don't shutup.  I would always have Billy read them and he loved them because he was the main character in most of them and he was a ham.  I wrote of our RV adventures and misadventures, but they were never sad.  After he left I swore I would not write unless it could be uplifting.  I tried a few times but my spark was gone.  My proofreader had left.  Today, I wrote of memories of places I cannot go back to now, but it wasn't sad.

“Something will have gone out of us as a people if we ever let the remaining wilderness be destroyed ... We simply need that wild country available to us, even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in.” ― Wallace Stegner, The Sound of Mountain Water

I was fishing at the top of a rocky cliff like this when I snagged a huge bass. Pulling it up, it naturally got knocked back into the water. I was not disappointed, the fun was in catch and release, it had just released itself. We saw it, it was huge. I have not seen Billy get so aggravated at the loss of a fish. It was funny to me. This is the Mountain Fork River (I think) that runs below Mena. Not our picture. While we lived in Arkansas for close to 20 years, we took advantage of the wilderness. Just on the edge of Mena was a park that had a trail that was rigorous. We walked that trail with our trekking sticks many times. You had to have a walking stick because it was a terribly unsteady trail. I saw my first mulberry tree in years and years. My Mammaw had had a huge one when I was a little girl.

The most beautiful wildernesses this side of NM and Colorado, we were on nearly every day. There was a wilderness that crossed the border of the two states. The trail was about five miles long and we walked it and back. Sometimes, most times, we never saw another person, but the little creeks that led into the Ouachita, Cossatot, Caddo, Mountain Fork and Poteau Rivers, we found with no footprints of modern man. Never found an arrowhead though. I looked. Never have found one and we walked places that you knew only the Native Americans had trod. (At least in my vivid imagination).

Those memories are in the past, won't happen again, but still are fresh enough to enjoy. It was a pleasant time in life. The wilderness is important, as Stegner said, "even if we never do more than drive to its edge and look in."

 

Possibly only slightly related...but looking at that picture caused me to think of it....I think there's something about being with nature that's very calming when trying to deal with grief, at least to me personally. I've never been the most 'outdoorsy' person, but of late I've enjoyed going for longer walks,and just being 'out there', listening to the sounds, looking at the water...I can't quite explain it, but I tend to come home feeling very refreshed and even fulfilled.

[Deb and Pat]

11 hours ago, kevin said:

Deb and Pat,....Welcome to club Grief, a place no one wants to be  , but a home we have all found....interesting quote from Robert Frost  in  three words I can sum up everything I've learned about life: it goes on......

Thanks kevin.  I look forward to being a part of you guys.

Deb

[Deb and Pat]

34 minutes ago, Dr Lenera said:

Possibly only slightly related...but looking at that picture caused me to think of it....I think there's something about being with nature that's very calming when trying to deal with grief, at least to me personally. I've never been the most 'outdoorsy' person, but of late I've enjoyed going for longer walks,and just being 'out there', listening to the sounds, looking at the water...I can't quite explain it, but I tend to come home feeling very refreshed and even fulfilled.

I agree very calming - and such neat memories - you have a good point here - focus on the memories you have not the ones you won't have.

Thanks

Deb

[Deb and Pat]

1 hour ago, kayc said:

I've come to appreciate the memories we have, maybe in a way, all the more so for knowing they won't happen again this side of heaven.

I am beginning to see this and have started to concentrate on the good and not the bad.  Thanks

Deb

[Deb and Pat]

On ‎6‎/‎14‎/‎2017 at 6:15 AM, Dr Lenera said:

Possibly only slightly related...but looking at that picture caused me to think of it....I think there's something about being with nature that's very calming when trying to deal with grief, at least to me personally. I've never been the most 'outdoorsy' person, but of late I've enjoyed going for longer walks,and just being 'out there', listening to the sounds, looking at the water...I can't quite explain it, but I tend to come home feeling very refreshed and even fulfilled.

Happily we lived in a house that is in a wooded area.  I continue to love being here - I continue to tell him when the yard is full of deer as we loved to watch them together.  A simple but happy thing for us.

Deb

[Margm]

Deb, we can all be alike in our grief, we can share it so easily, and then you have some odd one that has the grief, but does not share the same relief from things others do.  I lived in paradise.  Woods all around, houses hid by hills and valleys.  Wonderful neighbors.  I fed the squirrels and the rare chipmunks.  The raccoons and possums at night, and later in the night possibly other animals.  Woke up one morning and the deer were feeding on the little shoots that had grown up around the porch from the corn and grass seed scattered by the wildlife.  Billy's hummingbirds and watching for when they came and when they left.  I could not handle this quiet.  I could not handle this peacefulness because it was not peaceful to me.  It hammered my brain with destruction I had to run from.  So, we all handle it differently.  We loved the house, but we were leaving to move into the RV.  I hated housekeeping and Billy hated mowing those two acres even with the riding lawn mower.  People have yards as hobbies, to us they were prisons.  So, we all hurt, and we all handle grief the best way we can, some the same, some different, but the pain is always the same.

[kayc]

20 hours ago, Deb and Pat said:

Happily we lived in a house that is in a wooded area.  I continue to love being here - I continue to tell him when the yard is full of deer as we loved to watch them together.  A simple but happy thing for us.

Deb

The same with us!  We love living in the country, up in the mountains with both a forest and a creek.  He always called it "Our home in the clouds".   My old mobile home isn't worth anything but the land where I live, the surroundings are beautiful!  Deer, elk, foxes, skunks, bears, you name it, we have it...the only "visitors" I don't welcome are the cougars.

[Deb and Pat]

58 minutes ago, kayc said:

The same with us!  We love living in the country, up in the mountains with both a forest and a creek.  He always called it "Our home in the clouds".   My old mobile home isn't worth anything but the land where I live, the surroundings are beautiful!  Deer, elk, foxes, skunks, bears, you name it, we have it...the only "visitors" I don't welcome are the cougars.

Oh my no cougars here - what state do you live in - I live in Iowa?  Just raccoons and skunks here -

Deb

[kayc]

Oregon, the Cascades.

[Deb and Pat]

26 minutes ago, kayc said:

Oregon, the Cascades.

Nice - have not been to Oregon -

 

Deb

[kayc]

It's worth a visit!  Sounds like your area is as well.

[Deb and Pat]

40 minutes ago, kayc said:

It's worth a visit!  Sounds like your area is as well.

Sure does!  Right now we are averaging 90+ degrees in the daytime.  The humidity is also very high.  But it is a lot better than snow (yuck).

 

Deb

 

[kayc]

I don't mind the snow if it doesn't stick to the roads!