Positive Vs. Negative Outlook - How We Handle Grief

[melina]

I'm impressed by those who manage to keep a positive perspective throughout their grief process - Tammy, for example. I've always been something of a pessimist - maybe because I thought if I expected the worst, I wouldn't be disappointed. But when I lost my husband to cancer, the worst case scenario came true. And my pessimism did not prepare me. To say I was disappointed would be a major understatement.

If I'd been an optimist - keeping a positive perspective - maybe I'd be handling this grief a little better. I might even be happy. Practically, I'm doing okay, but emotionally, I'm not. I just can't see anything positive about this experience, unless I count having to become more self-reliant. I'm also having a lot of trouble finding positive things to cling to during the day. Birds chirping and flowers blooming just don't do it for me. It's not enough.

The other day I met a former colleague who just lost her husband a couple of months ago. He died of a stroke the day before he was going to retire. They had a lot of plans for their retirement. And yet she seemed optimistic. Almost manic. Maybe she was still on the grief-shock adrenaline rush. But she was trying to find all the positive things to make her days easier. I was surprised. At two months I was a complete mess.

How do you positive people manage to stay positive? Maybe my personality is just not able to "do grief".

Melina

[Anne E]

What an interesting observation to think about, Melina. My husband, Dick, and was glass half-empty type guy and I have always been a glass half-full type gal. He used to shake his head and say, "You get up every morning expecting to have a perfectly wonderful day and then are so shocked when things go down the dumper!" He was so correct.

I totally expected him to be an excellent candidate for lung transplants. I totally expected him to survive long enough for a donor and perfect match to be found. I totally expected him to survive the surgery and to recover nicely so we would go home to live happily ever after. It was a true, unbelievably horrifying shock to wake up and find him lying next to me dead. This was an uncomprehendable event for a Pollyanna optimist. While I was aware of the truth of our situation and was scared out of my mind most of the nine months, I always somehow to think positive thoughts and to find something positive about the situation of the moment. I think the alternative was just overwhelming and unacceptable to me. There was no way I had allowed myself to do much thinking about Dick dying.

My grief process has been, in my opinion, long and hard. It has been the hardest thing I have ever endured. While I am still a positive person, there are days I can't find much to be positive about. I spend days just thinking dark thoughts...not as many days as the first year after Dick's death, but there are still days. It's been three years since Dick's death and most days, I see positive, beautiful things to dwell on.

I love bright sunny days, birds chirping, my dogs running around being silly, and all that Hallmark card kind of stuff. I guess it's my nature.

I believe there is no good way to do grief. I think we just have to get up every day and do the work. What works for me, I'm sure won't work for you and what works for you, probably would not work for me. It's just grit your teeth and take it one step at a time.

Hang in there and try not to compare yourself to anyone else. Just treat yourself gently and be in the moment. That's the advise I got from my doctor and it works for me!

Anne

[pinkpony]

as hard as it somedays I have to stay positive to function. I have always been the "glass half full" person whereas my dh was the "glass half empty" person. no I don't understand why my love had to pass away after 30yrs together, but I know that there is a perfect plan for my life & loosing my dh & my son(20yrs ago)is part of that. I have learned we have no control over this, but we do have a choice to either be positive or negative, we can't change what happened, but we can help others & we can get stronger. My feeling is everyone is watching me to see if I fall apart or make really bad choices during this, I have to be strong & keep my faith as a witness to those people. I'm not saying I don't fall apart in private, but I still get up & try to move forward everyday.

[sunstreet]

Dear Melina,

I believe I have always been an optimist; always seeing the glass half full: and looking for what is for me to learn now. I really like the phrase MartyT used in another thread "we all have a griefprint" that is unique only to us; similar to our fingerprint. I also subscribe to the thinking that there are no right or wrong ways to grieve. I also believe that one can feel totally devistated and feel like there is nothing but darkness about and still feel positive. I think that these feelings can co-exist.

For myself what was key was to learn to let go of judging myself and welcome whatever feelings came along and let go of the thinking that everything wrong/bad that happened was somehow my fault. The other thing that was key for me was to develop and define a "self" and learn to "love" myself. Two songs are coming to mind for me that speak to me in regard to blossoming into the self-reliant woman that I have become since Melissa died. Tori Amos is the artist and the songs are: Everybody Else's Girl and Silent All These Years.

Melina, I think you are doing this grief work exactly right for you and to compare yourself to anyone else's path is unfair for you like all of us have your own unique "griefprint" and set of life experiences.

Blessings and Courage, Carol Ann

[Perkins808]

Many times I have been asked how I could possibly still be so positive after everything I've been through in my lifetime, and I have to admit that I am always stumped by this question. I don't know the answer to this question, it's just who I am.

I can tell you that it was certainly not my upbringing. My parents, God love them, are two of the most negative people ever. My father states everytime something bad happens that it's the "family curse".....and I just laught to myself. He insists that a black cloud floats over their house at all times. My theory? Bad things happen to good people all the time. ALL the time. AND, there is always someone out there who has it worse than me.

I guess my theory in life is this, and this is not to say how anybody else lives is right or wrong, this is just what works for me......life is short, you never know what it's going to throw at you. Bad things are going to happen, but if I spent everyday dwelling on that than my heart wouldn't be open for the good things.....and I think there are still so many good things to experience.

Someone in another thread had asked how we knew we had met our soul mate. Well, this is how I knew Jeff was mine. That man had been through more pain and suffering in his lifetime, fighting a horrible auto-immune disease, going through a very painful divorce that he never wanted....yet he always had a smile on his face. He was the most positive man I've ever met.....and yet he had been given so many reasons to not be. The smile you see on his face in the picture of the two of us (it was taken when we were on our honeymoon, which we were able to squeeze in between chemo and radiation treatments!).....well, that was the smile on his face every day, good or bad. He had been diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. He knew he was going to die.....and yet for 9 months he still found a reason to say life is good. He lived every day! If he can still be positive and have a smile on his face every day while facing that? I think that just reinforces my beliefs in why I live the way I do.

I don't think there is a right way or wrong way to "do grief". I think we just have to find a way that works for us.

I also want to point out that some days I am positive I am losing my mind. Some days I am positive that I've cried a bucket of tears. Some days I am positive that my heart aches so badly that it's just going to stop. So I guess not all "positives" are a good thing.

[kayc]

That's an interesting thought, it'd be good to have a study done on that...does that glass half full or glass half empty really have an impact on how we come out in our grieving process? Ultimately it doesn't change the fact that they're gone and that we have to go on without them. It doesn't change the fact that we have countless adjustments to make or that we miss them with every fiber in our being. Does the glass half full person experience a better outcome though? Do they adjust faster, end up with a better life when all is said and done? Does their optimism help them somehow in their adjusting process? Perhaps. But I wouldn't jump to that conclusion without some facts for basis...it really would make a good government study, wouldn't it?

It does help to look on the bright side of things. Can we retrain ourselves to do that? Can pessimists turn into optimists?

[melina]

It does help to look on the bright side of things. Can we retrain ourselves to do that? Can pessimists turn into optimists?

Or more importantly, can grieving pessimists turn into optimists? I think not. We pessimists can try to look on the bright side of life, (am reminded of Monty Python here), but it's not that easy when life tips you into a deep dark pit.

I constantly remind myself however that there are millions of people in the world a lot worse off. There are people suffering war, poverty, unnecessary disease (when there are easy cures to be found), and general injustice. I remind myself of all this - but then I forget when my own grief washes over me.

Sometimes I think that when my youngest son finally moves out, that I should pull up my meager roots here and go off and do something useful. Maybe join Doctors Without Borders and work in a war-torn area or something. Except of course there's the dog. I wish someone could just come and tell me what it is I'm supposed to do, instead of me having to figure it out by myself.

Melina

[mfh]

I go back and forth...I don't think I have ever been a totally pessimistic person nor am I a totally optimistic person. I look for the good and sometimes find it in these difficult times. I also know that I focus on pain when i need to. It is just a mix for me. Not living at either extreme does not mean I am in balance...it just means i go back and forth between the two...always aiming for something like balance but usually responding to each day or event as best I can. I guess I choose not to be totally optimistic as I feel that is as unreal as being totally pessimistic. this post is all over the place too but that is where i am this week...scattered like someone took the lid off the popcorn just as it was popping hard. I posted elsewhere that I lost my balance about 10 days ago and am scattered and running about too much in order to avoid pain. A friend came over, my 81 years old wise friend, and we sat up until 2am talking and I got in touch with what I was doing....and now will attempt to settle down again. A constant battle for me. mfh

[pinkpony]

I do think our attitude plays a major role in how we survive this. My son died 20yrs ago of SIDS, I still had 3 young children 1 being his identical twin & had I let negativity enter my world I would not have been strong enough to take care of my family. when my dh found out that he had 3-6 months to live w/ treatment or 3-6wks w/o his positive attitude gave him the will to live instead of giving up. Its real easy to be negative & just say "I can't do it" but it takes a lot of strength to get up in the morning & say "I will stay positive today & do things I thought I couldn't". Our loved ones want us to survive this. My dh left me a letter & the wises words he said in it were "remember the happy times, not the sad"

[Dwaynecg]

For me I have always been a positive, I never want to think any other way. Even with Pauline having those down ward slide, Time after time I always staid positive and tried my best to keep her that way. I was positive she would pull through, God had other plans and took her pain way alone with her soul. After I tried to keep positive will crying days on end. We are all different in this grief we are all feeling. For me now it is very hard to handle, I just go day by day. Some days I feel so down and hard to even move, other days I get things done, and move forward in my new life. Some day I hope soon I find my balance instead of the big swing down then up. I know where I want to go but getting there is hard. It is because of the great love we lost that makes it so hard on us. If we did not have that where would we be at today. I was so fortunate I had Pauline for 33 years. Now I have ME, and all those memories that will help me go on and go on I will just like all of you.

Dwayne

[beakerj]

Hey Melina, I too am amazed by those who remain & are relentlessly positive.

I'm naturally an optimist, but grief ground me down & weirded me out to the point where all I could see was hopelessness, pain & darkness. I'm starting to feel more like my 'normal' self now, which I'm amazed at as I thought grief had broken my mood forever. My 'griefprint' was very different from what I had been expecting...

I do think there's value in looking for the good in life & not just letting the bad swallow us up - when & if we can. I've always given thanks for 10 things every night as I go to sleep, & can do this again now mostly. But sometimes just surviving is all we can do.

I'm learning a lot from the people here!

Warmest wishes,

Becka

[HAP]

Friends,

I logged onto this earlier today, read everyone's comments, and it started me thinking. But I have been in the middle of a very down day for about 48 hours and i did not want to rush replying to this strand until I'd had a chance to percolate on some of the issues this raised for me.

In an earlier post--a couple of weeks into my time here--I wrote about a quote that has always meant a lot to me. It comes from a series of Spyder Robinson stories written mostly inthe '70s and '80s about a bar somewhere in upstate New York called Callahan's. The narrator is introduced to the place by his psychiatrist after the death of his wife and daughter in a car accident he created by trying to save a few bucks by doing a brake job himself. He was not a very good mechanic.

The motto of the place is simple: shared pain is lessened; shared joy is multiplied. All the regulars--and frequently the new folks who come through the door--carry ungodly burdens of grief and guilt. Jake's history is not the worst in the room. But they work daily on their issues. When they need to cry, there is always a shoulder to cry on. When there is good news for one they view it as good news for all. They even schedule regular nights for bad puns and shaggy dog stories to take them away from those burdens they carry.

I said then that this place felt very much like that bar to me--minus the alcohol and the really bad puns. Since then, it has become even more like that for me. We all come through the door in different places in our grief. We all have different issues and--because we are all human and all coming out of different backgrounds and experiences--we all have different ways of dealing with that grief. Those differences go beyond whether we are inherently optimistic or pessimistic. The way we lost our spouses/significant others has a huge impact on how we deal with their deaths. Knowing someone will die in a particular time frame is very different from having them die unexpectedly. Those of us who really got to say good-bye have had something very different than those of us to whom it happened suddenly and without any real warning. Our varied beliefs about the afterlife also get dealt into the equation--and the strength of our beliefs in that afterlife. I would be dealing with my wife's death very differently, I suspect, were I an atheist or if I had less certainty about what happens to the spirit after the body dies.

But we are all here because we are looking for help in healing this awful wound we have all experienced. Some of us write reams.Some of us can barely rouse a sentence out of the depths of our despair. Others of us read what others have written--and rarely comment. Some of us share largely positive moments from our days. Others of us take refuge here more often when the hurt becomes overwhelming and we need some place where we can scream our agony and have people understand what we are going through. Some of us, I suspect, are embarrassed to admit we need something like this--I know i was when i first signed on. Those of us of the male persuasion in particular feel we are supposed to be able to do this stuff without help--that crying--even electronically among people we are unlikely ever to meet--is somehow a sign of weakness.

But we all bring something of great value to the table--our selves. If i were told to write this much every day--that it would be good for my healing process, I probably could not do it. As a former journalist I find it very hard to write without some kind of audience. If the only audience is myself, it is somehow not worth the doing. My life has been about trying to understand myself--and about trying to understand others. Once i have those understandings I am compelled to write about them.

But that is not all this site does for me. In sharing your individual experiences--both positive and negative--I learn about each of you and about the journey we are each on. While all our journeys are different--the griefprint--they also share DNA. In sharing the positives and negatives of our days we begin to create a map of this strange new world we find ourselves inhabiting. In our day-to-day lives we are abnormal. Our experiences are so far outside the realm of many of those we know that we might just as well be space aliens trying to describe what it is like to float through the frigid gasses of Jupiter or swim the liquid methane seas of Io. But here we discover that we are not alone. From what those who have been here a while write we discover some hints of what the road ahead of us looks like--and that the things we are experiencing are not so totally odd after all.

And when the grief threatens to overpower us, there are many hands reaching out to us, reminding us that while we have lost something irreplaceable, there are still those who would miss us if we suddenly vanished into the abyss of depression and suicide.

Every post--positive, negative, or in between--serves to link us back to this world and to our own humanity. Someone wrote recently about purpose. For some of us, we need serve no greater purpose than to hold each other's hands in this great darkness--to reassure each other in our times of despair that the light will return. There is nothing we can do to help those who have died--they are beyond our power to help or hinder. But we are yet among the living--and that is where our work remains. Whether we like it or not, there will always be new members of this club that no one wants to join. Here, the newly widowed are greeted with open and understanding arms. Here they can howl and no one will think ill of them. We have all been there. We have all been held in that embrace when we needed it. We all extend that embrace--even the newly arrived soon after they get here--to whoever walks through that door and needs that hug.

Each of us is blessed with a unique set of experiences and skills that we bring to this place. We develop new skills and new perspectives the longer we are here. We learn from each other's mistakes, fears, depressions, failures and joys. This is a better community--for all that we are here just unscrambled electrons--than most of us have experienced in our lifetimes. Here we can weep, rage, rail and laugh-and no one will judge us negatively for those actions. We are free here to let our true emotions out of hiding--and in letting them out we gain control over them in ways we could not accomplish if our only context were with the physical world of the real communities we live in where some of our rants would be grounds for locking us up .

My path is not your path. Your path is not my path. But our paths lie parallel to each other--some more closely than others--but even the most distant are still parallel--and have at least some similar points of reference. What any one of us experiences in this journey may be of great use to some of us but much less so to others. That does not matter. What matters is that in sharing our stories--good, bad , or indifferent--we decrease the sorrow we feel and increase the level and kinds of joy we are capable of feeling.

This is not a race. There are no prizes because there is no finish line. As the Tao says: "Sometimes things are ahead and sometimes they are behind. It is the nature of things." So let us rejoice when things are going well for any of us. And let us share the burden when things are not so good that the burden the individual carries is lessened to something more manageable.To be a true anarchist/communist/socialist about this--smile, folks, that is supposed to be a joke--we all contribute here equally according to our strengths--and profit in it according to our needs of the moment. Today, i may feel pretty good and be able to help someone else. But tomorrow I may be in need--and i know those needs will be met--not because I have done anything in the past to merit that help--but simply because I am a human being in need.

I warned you guys it is dangerous to get me thinking about stuff.

Peace,

Harry

Peace

[pinkpony]

Harry that was beautiful.

thank you

[just one more hug]

Harry....I thank you also....it was wonderful reading..

[sunstreet]

Dear Harry,

Thank you for your post. Your words so poignant and so true! Absolutely heartwarming and wise!

Blessings and Courage, Carol Ann

[sunstreet]

Dear Melina,

I so hear you and understand and agree with you that when life tips you into a deep dark pit that it seems absolutely impossible that you will ever climb your way out and up out of the darkness. I have been in the pit more than one time in my life so much so that I thought suicide was the answer and each time I did climb up out of that darkness and thank my God that I chose life and that where I am today; darkness can no longer be seen or felt.

I did not get to this place over night; it has been a long climb; and even though when I began my climb I did not believe I would make it or it would even make a difference; I made the choice to forge ahead; feel my doubts; feel the fear and just go about climbing.....and here I am today living in joy and Light.

I was not always an optimist I don't think; so for me I was able to change from being a pessimist to an optimist. I think when my Father developed Alzheimer's and I started to study the brain; I came to learn that the brain is very malleable and actually become quite encouraged for myself that perhaps how I had been conditioned during my formative years could be undone or re-programmed so to say. This is when I think my pessimist self began to loose control and my optimism was given birth.

Please know I totally resonate and validate your pain and I care deeply and wish nothing but peace for you.

Blessings and Courage, Carol Ann