Grieving Your Way

True confession time: one of my all-time favorite movies is Mr. Mom. Michael Keaton is brilliant and the movie is just good, silly, family fun.

In one of my favorite scenes, a recently laid off Michael Keaton is driving his kids to school on his wife’s first day of work. As they approach the school, his son says, “Dad, you’re doing it wrong!”

“I’m not doing it wrong,” he responds.

“Yes, you are. You’re doing it wrong.”

“Why are they honking at me?”

“Because you’re doing it wrong!”

At the drop off point, the crossing guard comes over and says “You’re doing it wrong!”

I think he was doing it wrong!

In the movie, the school had a “north to drop off, south to pick up” system, so yeah, he was doing it wrong. He was driving the wrong direction according to that system.

However, there is no “doing it wrong” for 99% of life.

One of the places there is absolutely no “doing it wrong” is the grieving process.

This became so clear to me during the 5 months after my feisty Australian shepherd Iko died.

My daughter Lexi grieved in her way. At least once a week, she quietly approached me with big, sad eyes and simply says, “Iko.” Sometimes she’d sit on my lap, sometimes we’d hug as we stand in the hallway, and sometimes she missed hearing Iko’s breathing at the foot of her bed at bedtime when we were already cuddling. No matter when it happened, I held her and she shared her feelings and thoughts with me until she felt better.

My son Zane grieved in his way. For him, it looked like everyone else crying and him saying “What’s the big deal?” That’s exactly how it was until Thanksgiving, three and a half months after Iko died.

We were watching the Christmas fireworks display at Disneyland, listening to the schmaltzy music, and drinking hot chocolate. Then the fake snow started falling, and all of a sudden, I had a sobbing kid splayed out across my lap. When I asked Zane what was wrong, he said, “I miss Iko.” He cried for over thirty minutes that night.

Since then, he has been able to talk about missing Iko and add to our conversations when we talk about her instead of staying silent and bottled up. That night at Disneyland, he finally allowed himself to feel his feelings and it allowed him to move on in his grieving process.

I grieved in my own way. My sadness hit me at unexpected times over those few months– in my yoga class when prompted to think of someone I love, in my spinning class when a song lyric hit my ear in just the right way, and when I opened the mail a few weeks after Iko’s death to find a framed photo of her as a young dog.

My biggest grieving surprise was finding tears rolling down my face as I looked out the window of the Skunk Train as we pulled out of the station in Fort Bragg a month after Iko’s passing. I had caught a quick glimpse of a man and his dog standing on a street corner. The dog was sitting at the man’s feet and gazing up at his face. I have a photo on my wall of Iko looking up at me and Chris the same way.

The logistics of our grieving is different, but the process is the same.

Two keys to the grieving process are:

Feel what you feel when you feel it. We all feel things in different ways and at different times. Whatever you are feeling is okay. Let that feeling move through you. Emotions are like energy, they are meant to move through us. When we hold our feelings back or deny them, they stay bottled up inside us.

What you resist persists. Don’t resist your feelings, feel them. And then notice that the energy of your feelings moves like a wave through you, the intensity moving up and then down and then finally dissipating.

It’s okay to feel sad, because some days you will. It’s also okay not to feel sad, because some days you won’t. Feel your feelings whether they are “good” or “bad.” Try to accept them just as they are without judging them or resisting them.

It’s only in feeling our feelings that we move through to experience whatever our next feeling will be. And maybe that next feeling will be love, appreciation, happiness, contentment, gratitude, or even joy.

Take care of yourself. Grieving is a physical process that can last for weeks or months (or even years). In the early stages, it’s especially important to be extra gentle with yourself and find ways to nurture yourself. We have five aspects to our being (physical, mental, emotional, spiritual and energetic), and you can find at least one way to take care of yourself for each aspect. Here are a few examples:

Physical: take a warm bath and just relax (adding 2 cups of Epsom salts and 2 cups of baking soda create a detox bath that heals all 5 levels of your being), take a walk, cry.

Mental: write down specific happy memories of your pet, record your pet’s quirks and idiosyncrasies, create a scrapbook with stories and memories and photos, or create an affirmation that is comforting to you, such as “I love my pet and my pet loves me, she is alive in the love of my heart.”

Emotional: allow yourself time and space to feel your feelings as close to when they arise as possible. I allowed myself to cry that afternoon on the Skunk Train and my wave of sadness passed in a few minutes. It was a little awkward to cry in a public place, but it felt good to have cried. It’s okay to feel whatever you are feeling. Accept that is okay to feel happiness even after your pet has passed. Just feel it and see where it goes.

Spiritual: remind yourself of whatever your spiritual beliefs are and find comfort there, forgive yourself for any judgments you have about how things should have gone differently or any thoughts that you should have done anything differently. What happened, happened and it is over and done. If you could have done it differently, you would have. You were doing the best you could. For my spiritual perspective on death and dying, please see this blog.

Energetic: Get some kind of energy work done – receive massage, acupuncture, acupressure, an energy balancing, or take a detox bath, or do yoga. Allow the energy in your body to move and heal.

With these two keys as guidelines, you can move through your process in your own way and honor yourself and your beloved pet. You’re not doing it wrong!

And don’t forget a few hugs, too!

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