Posted by:
exminion
(
)
Date: April 23, 2018 02:18AM
I lost my entire family, in 5 years. My parents lived to be 93 and 95, then all my siblings died too young, of cancer. I became an orphan. As Mormons do, the surviving spouses all remarried within a year. I want people to heal and be happy, but I feel that marrying so quickly showed a lack of respect, and shallowness--well, they were always shallow, anyway.
I think of my parents every day, in a positive way. It helps to remember the best times.
We spend more hours close to our pets, than to any other human, except our children when they are little. I'm single, and my black lab was never farther away than 4 feet from me, whenever I was home, and she slept at the foot of the bed, and her bed had to be touching my bed, or she wouldn't stay in it. She was my son's puppy, but my children grew up and moved away into apartments, dorms, fraternity houses for college, and left her behind with me. She and I were kind of in the same situation. No human would have stayed up all night with me, when I was in pain, or would have listened to me talk about my troubles. She encouraged me to get up and outside and hike in these beautiful mountains. Without her, I might have just gone to work, and come home and curled up on the couch in a ball. I had no Mormon friends, as they all shunned me.
I still, sometimes, pick up my phone to call my favorite brother, to share something funny that happened, which he would appreciate. Then it hits me all over again, that he is gone. It's those times that kill me. I call my grandchildren's black lab by my black lab's name, accidentally, all the time.
Part of adjusting is to accept sorrow and death as part of life. Don't ever beat yourself up for having feelings, or for not feeling enough. It used to upset me that Mormons rejoiced too much at funerals, and would say things like, "He's with his mother and father, now," and "What a happy reunion they must be having in the Celestial Kingdom, right now!" Believing in a hereafter or not believing in a hereafter--is all the same to me. Death is not easier or harder to face, either way. I will always hate and fear death.