The grieving process for my grandmother is ongoing. It doesn’t just go away, or get better quickly. The peak of this first grieving/raw stage is at weeks 6-8, so this will get harder before it gets easier. This is related to a relationship with a person I loved, that I horribly miss.

And everything comes to mind during this grieving process. All of these feelings have more technical terms in my “grief handbook”, but they look like this:

1. This is hard to accept. It’s not easy to accept this even happened. Where did she go? She was just here a few weeks ago.

2. The doctors screwed up. I sometimes think of how the odds were 5% that this would happen during the surgery to clamp the anyurysm. But it happened to her.

3. It happened so suddenly, she was not planning on this. No one plans on dying, and she certainly wasn’t sick, or dying. In fact, she was better than ever. That makes me sad.

4. I’m sad. I cry often, then the joy comes. Some people worry, they think I’m in this sad place all the time. I am grieving normally. In the grief handbook it talks about Don’ts such as “he’s beeing so strong”. Grief work will wait for you.

5. My wife is grieving too. This is her first grieving experience. It’s hit her hard, like her own because gramma, because Amanda (abuelita) lived here in our home and shared life with Rachelle.

6. I’m doing better than with my dad four years ago. Really. That was tough. This time I’m trying not to become superman and do more. I’m also in relationship with more friends sooner. With my dad, it took panick attacks for me to reach out to people. This time, I don’t have my gramma to talk to, but I have friends at church, the staff, friends from my chilhood, my father in law, and others. I may at some point call my grief counselor Sue just to talk.

7. This is a royal pain.

8. Where’s God? I know all of my Christian friends out there have their verses ready to ‘fix’ this, or give hope, etc. Yes. I know the verses too and they do give me hope. And I don’t mind getting the verses. Sometimes I get the odd remark from those who don’t know what to say and so they turn “christiney” on you. I understand. The verses do help, just not in the way you think. They don’t take away the pain, they don’t make this stop. And I’m not unspiritual or a weak believer for grieving. We do grieve differently because we have hope, and I know I will see my grandmother in streets of gold. It’s just that right now I’d rather see her on the streets of Roswell, where we live.

With that said….please pray Psalm 30 over me and others who grieve:

Psalm 30:

4 Sing to the LORD , you saints of his;