weeding my garden

i'm still here. the last couple of days have been so hectic. in between grieving, working on my new projects, and dealing with my car getting a flat tire i haven't had a spare moment to post like i want to. arrgh! i'm still dealing with the drastic ebb and flow of grief. i had an appt with my counselor on sun, and i think i cried more that day (more than 3 months out) then i have ever cried with her. so many feelings, and emotions can hit you without any warning, and that is exactly what happened on sun. but i continue to take it 1 step/breath/moment at a time.

a dear friend of mine posted a quote on her facebook page that got me thinking. it was: "friendship isn't about who you've known the longest ... it's about who came and never left your side." for some reason that quote kind of left me momentarily speechless. i have been doing so much thinking about this very topic since Juju passed away. a few months ago i even posted about the fact that i had begun the hard process of analyzing the relationships in my life.

my sweet friend, angie, shared this article with me after my original post. the article, entitled "weeding your garden" is a personal account by the author, which compares this process of scrutinizing the relationships in our lives after the death of our children to, well, weeding a garden. it is a fantastic article, and pretty much summed up everything that i had been feeling or going through. but i found the following paragraph particularly true:

It was the death of my child that was different. I had changed overnight but they had not. I was not that same person any longer and they wanted the “old” me back. They wanted everything to go back to “normal”. But this was the new me and my life had taken a different path and this was a journey they did not want to take with me. My grief had suddenly shifted from grief for my son to anger towards them and I was going down a very dangerous road. I had veered off my path of grief and was headed down the winding road of hate and rage. My world was spinning out of control and I needed to reclaim it. I realized that my focus needed to be on my son if I was going to move through this grief process in a healthy way. It would have been very easy to shut out everyone. But what I needed to do was to remove any outside forces that were preventing me from my journey.

i have learned that real friendship *isn't* at all about the people i have known the longest, or even the people i have met in person. it's about the people that stand by you at your very worst moments. it's about those that are there while you are red-faced from crying, sitting on the floor, with snot running down your face, and don't turn away. it's about those people that drive over to your house to cut your hair because you feel as though it's suffocating you and keeping you from grieving. it's about those that rise above their fears of losing a child themselves, or potentially upsetting you, or {insert numerous other reasons people give for staying away}, and reach out anyway. it's about those that acknowledge your child, and the impact that they had {and continue to have} in your life even though they are not physically on this earth with us. that is what real, true friendship is about. yes, i have been disappointed in some people. yes, i have felt abandoned by some that i considered close friends. but, luckily, for every 1 person that has abandoned or disappointed me, it feels like 2 more have taken up their post. i may have lost some friends through this, but i have not felt as though my "love bubble" has gotten smaller - in fact, i think it's grown.

i never thought that i would be doing so much re-arranging of my life. i never thought grief would have such an impact on every.single.aspect of my life {seriously, there is even certain foods that i cannot eat anymore, and places i still can not go because they so painfully remind me of that horrid day}. this is the collateral damage of grief. unfortunately, i'm on this different path. and because i'm here, i *have* to make the painful choice to let go of friendships/relationships that i have held onto for various reasons. i need to, as the author of the article so eloquently put it, remove any outside forces that prevent me from my journey through grief. but i wish i didn't even have to make these decisions at all...