[Treasur]

Your grief is not being graded.

What a very good and useful phrase. Quite so.
Funnily enough.....and idk if this is your experience too, Evermore.....the most harsh and consistent judge of my ‘progress’ or perspective in these years has always been me. Which is weird, right? I don’t think anyone else has ever said anything so harsh or unkind to me as I said to myself.

I can recall a time a few years ago when I realised I had this big mental calendar, ticking like a loud clock in the crocodile’s stomach like in Peter Pan though lol, that made me feel that ‘wherever’ I was wasn’t quick enough or far enough or how I should be. And then a moment of insight that the clock was an imaginary one that I had created, it wasn’t actually real. And that beating myself up had not actually made one jot of positive difference either lol. So nput the clock/calendar away which was quite nice 

Not such good news about my uncle. Found out yesterday that he has kidney cancer....a large active growth on one kidney and smaller signs on the second. So he is booked in to have the tumour removed on one in 6 weeks time and then idk, guess it depends on what any biopsy tells them. He is being very matter of fact and wanting to treat it like no big deal, so I am mirroring that, but of course it is a big deal and 6 weeks sounds like a long time to me. But we support folks best by respecting how they want to approach things, don’t we? And he knows I am here to talk to if he needs that.

[Evermore]

I’m so sorry Treasure. That really is a big deal. I can absolutely understand why you would feel a little ‘set back’. 
I’m thinking it might be helpful after all to cut and paste the FB post here after all: “How do you talk to yourself about your grief?
Do you find yourself saying things like “I should be further along by now” or “I thought I was past this”?
Or maybe you’ve thought something like “I was doing so well…what happened?”
If any of these thoughts sound familiar, you’re definitely not alone.
But, please remember: your grief is not being graded. I know sometimes it feels like it is, whether on your own grading scale or someone else’s. But, it’s not on any specific timeline. It’s not one-size-fits-all. And it’s definitely not linear.
Some days will be heavier than others. Some days, the triggers will be obvious, and some days they will not.
Please don’t weigh your heart down with overwhelming expectations for yourself or your processing. Please don’t judge yourself for the days the grief hits hard and leaves you winded and wounded. Please don’t feel guilty for the days that joy trickles in. Please be gentle with yourself as you navigate the ups and downs of your grief, as you figure out how to acknowledge the tension that’s created in a heart that’s known great love and great loss. This is a lifelong process.
There’s no set grade, only grace.
For you. For me. For every grieving heart. 🙏🏻❤️”

Typing on my phone so sorry if formatting sucks.
Hugs Treasur. Sending good thoughts  for your uncle.

[Treasur]

Little update from my bit of the planet.
Uncle survived the surgery although he is in quite a bit of post-op discomfort. They ended up having to remove one kidney entirely which is a concern bc the remaining kidney has growths too albeit slower-growing. His timing was pretty good as junior doctors are on strike here right now. Having said that, I have been a bit horrified by the lack of any post op follow through....no advice on diet, no wound check up and no conversation with a doctor about what might need to happen next. He is supposed to have a follow up scan in a few weeks so hopefully he will get some information then....

Was due to visit my Mum but the care home called to say she has tested positive for Covid. They have had a bit of a surge in the care home so tested everyone. Apparently she is not seriously unwell with it but still, it’s a concern. And it means I can’t visit for a little while.

Spring is finally showing up here and that always makes me feel better; lots of time spent outside, a little sunshine and some lovely bright green spring growth along with lots of birdsong.

Had a slightly odd conversation with an old chum this week about her romantic travails. I’ve known her for almost 40 years and she is a pretty decent and interesting kind of human. A sort of mix between a Labrador puppy and a bright orange rose with thorns. Horrible family history which means that I understand her lens even when I don’t agree with it. Or when she doesn’t see it and it’s not my place to state the (to me) obvious. She has an adopted teenage daughter and has never been married or lived with a partner....a long history of romantic dramas with emotionally unavailable men (much like her father tbh who was a toxic a$$hat as a parent imho).

About 7 or 8 years ago she had an off and on relationship with a man called H.....he was separated from his off-on partner of some decades...young adult children, a busy job, not great at communicating emotionally, his own history of mental health struggles. Lots of drama and she eventually pulled the plug on it reluctantly. And then recently he reappeared in her life. In the intervening years, his partner had moved back in and back out and back in. He had young adult children with addiction issues and now grandchildren who were at risk of being removed from the family if he didn’t foster them. Oh, and a ‘secret’ young adult daughter in Canada about the same age as his oldest daughter bc he was unfaithful to his then partner when she was pregnant, didn’t know about the daughter for years, had some kind of relationship for a while but recently she cut him off. Lots of mess, right? My goodness....

Apparently, according to my chum, he has told his live- in partner that he wants to be with my friend and his solution - after 2 months of a hot and heavy emotional ( but not physical, my friends choice to largely protect herself emotionally) romance, his ‘plan’ is that he will just move in with her and her daughter, leaving his ‘partner’ in the flat he owns....so tbh technically my friend is an ow. Probably for the second time. And this man - in his early 60s as is my friend - has more historic red flags as a reliable adult partner than a whole host of Chinese parades 

What was interesting about the conversation was hearing her rather (to me) odd lens. And extraordinary blind spots about her own draw towards these kind of less than straightforward chaps who do a lot of pursuit (with words) and distance (with actions). How her focus is almost solely on what he ‘needs to change’ for their relationship to work out, how full of a fixy to do list for him she is, how teenagerish her language is about how he’s changed and their passionate ‘twu luv’, how almost callous she sounds - and she is not a callous woman usually - about the impact of H’s choice on an already rather disordered family set up with a lot of messy history or what a new life with a man with a big messy extended family might mean practically, how she sees herself as at least partly the answer to his real happiness and vice versa. And tbh how she is not even considering her own lack of partnership experience let alone his track record  As I listened to her (and you can all imagine that there were many things I did not say in the spirit of horses to water etc  ), I was struck that it was a very ow type of conversation, that I could imagine the ow in my h’s situation saying much the same to her friends..... And my friend is (normally) a very smart, highly educated independent rather admirable woman, not an immature idiot. It was an interesting visit to how ow heads might work tbh....

What did I say? Well, I care about her and of course the information I have is only via her. I tried to encourage her to set and keep her own self-care boundaries, to do things to detach from his (and her) emotional rollercoaster, to remind her that there was a great deal that she could not know about his family/partner relationships and that all these other people were real people with their own legitimate feelings about H and his history, that tbh a lot of this was simply not about her and not about his relationship with her, to cool her jets, maybe reflect on the difference between love and attachment with a good IC,  and see if H’s actions over time met his words. What I didn’t say - bc it would have been futile, hurtful and beyond her ability to hear imho - is that she is playing out her own baggage wounds of ‘getting’ an emotionally unavailable man, that H comes with a huge amount of baggage himself that is unlikely to magically disappear in his early 60s and that even if she gets what she wants, she is like.y to find herself wishing she hadn’t. It’s like watching a slow motion car wreck tbh. And bc I love her, all I can think of to do is be a safe place for her to figure her own mess out when she gets to that point.

But oh my goodness...who would want this kind of drama?
I suspect tbh that, regardless of what we tell ourselves for a while as LBS, what I am hearing from my friend is probably a pretty accurate window into these kind of relationships. Bc I am not involved, it is easy to see that the chances of this working out well for anyone involved are virtually zero....and that even if they ‘end up together’, they will do so as two damaged folks surrounded by chaos trying to make a silk purse from a sow’s ear....I can’t see anything good coming from any of it and it’s seems obvious to me that my friend simply does not get how far from normal or healthy any of it is bc she is blinded by her own baggage and her own wants.

I am very grateful this morning that this kind of ow world is as alien to me now as it ever was.
But it’s an odd experience to see it playing out in a friend who I love and respect.

[Nas]

Glad to hear your uncle's surgery went okay, though not happy to hear of the awful post-surgery stress that comes in the form of "what the hell comes next"? In my experience, it's crazy that it takes a more-than-considerable amount of energy (that the one undergoing surgery and any other treatments/side effects DOES NOT have) to gather information and advocate for oneself. I just had a surgery this past Friday for an issue stemming from a previous huge surgery that no one prepared me for and that I understandably didn't have the appropriate knowledge/foresight (not to mention emotional bandwidth) to consider/anticipate. Really angering, honestly. I didn't go to medical school, so the people around me who did and are charged with helping me should have been guiding me.

This is where I found online support groups invaluable. The ability to go to a group and say "This is what is happening in my situation right now, what should I be looking out for, what questions should I be asking?" is helpful. Obviously it's all other people's unique experiences and you have to verify everything, but it helps to hear about experiences people have had that you would never have anticipated.

so tbh technically my friend is an ow.

Not a technicality, imo. She appears, from what you've written, to be an OW of her own very deliberate choice to be one.
There's no situation where you should be talking to another person's partner about your desire to be with them. Or that you have feelings for them at all. Once that is a part of the conversation, you've already long crossed the line.

I'm recovering from surgery, in pain and fairly medicated, so I'll avoid what could end up to be a very lengthy amount of rambling on this topic, lol. I'll share a few incomplete thoughts, but this could be a great discussion thread. I do think it's an important reminder that, as much as we would like to believe all OPs are unhinged and pure evil, a good amount of them are just people - people with their own unhealed issues and a lack of emotional intelligence to see past their desperate desire to be "loved." 

The other thing it made me think of is how much I actually disagree with the idea that we can't control how we feel. I mean, sure, we feel how we feel, but we can control what we do with those feelings. We can definitely control whether we take the feeling and dissect it to see how much of it really has to do with our own "stuff" (to use a catchall word).
Imagine the chaos if we lived in a world where no one could control how they feel? Yikes... (I know, I know, the world is chaos already...but just imagine this on top of it...)

[Treasur]

Couldn’t agree more, Nas.

I hope you are recovering from your surgery well. Tbh I think one of our growing realisations here is that our National Health Service - for all its benefits - has evolved into more of a National Hospital Service. A lot of the joined up bits of the overall healthcare system are simply not functioning well for a variety of reasons that have all been several years in the making.

[Reinventing]

......who do a lot of pursuit (with words) and distance (with actions)

I was struck by this succinct way of saying this.

[MadLuv]

Isn’t just odd how easily some can jump from one relationship into the next? It is just bizarre to me always. My X got bored so easily with life and I always saw that, but we would have to move for work and the new city and job would be enough for a while. Then it had to be a new car every 2 years. I guess that got boring and so then OW came along. Sounds like you’re intelligent friend may be a bit lonely and needy in life and her intelligence may have disguised that for some time. Thats what I jumped to in my head at least. 🤷‍♀️ otherwise why would an intelligent woman not see the bouquet of red flags being handed back to her.

[Treasur]

It was my mother’s birthday yesterday so I went to visit with perfume and flowers. No cake bc she has now reached a stage where feeding herself is rarely possible. I could write a long list of all the things that dementia has taken from her and me, but I won’t.

What I actually took from my visit is how remarkably strong love can be despite all of it. For any LBS like me, without children or other close family members you love, our ex/spouses do a bit of a hatchet job on the concept of love itself, don’t they? But it isn’t true....their take on love might not be the good stuff, but it does not mean that the good stuff is not out there and not remarkable when you brush against it. Nowadays, my mother and me mostly communicate with our eyes.....when our eyes meet, I see hers light up and I know she knows me and loves me every bit as much as she always did. Often she giggles....no idea why but recently she seems to find me pretty funny lol. There are so many things we can no longer do together that we used to do to show our love for each other, that’s true....but I am a bit humbled by how remarkably strong love is and how it somehow seems to find a way to reach round the most limiting circumstances.

[xyzcf]

My mom had dementia for about 12 years. I am grateful that she continued to recognize her children.

Her favourite thing was hard candy. She lived in a facility near my brother ( I of course had left her and the rest of the family behind trasping the world with Mr. xyzcf) and my brother had to buy a bagful fofcandy or her every week. I too would bring her flowers when I would visit and she would come to my brother's house and we'd gather together as a family.

She liked playing Bingo (one card only and the staff would help her with that) and she loved the sing-a-longs...especially the songs from WWII era.

I miss them..my mum, my dad and my sister. Next week, I am traveling to Canada for 10 days and will see all of my family (in 4 different locations). I have a brother, nieces and nephews, their spouses and children...and we shall laugh and eat and talk about Granny and Papa.... I'll travel by train between cities which is something that is very nostalgic and beautiful for me....so many memories.

.but I am a bit humbled by how remarkably strong love is and how it somehow seems to find a way to reach round the most limiting circumstances.

It does indeed. Glad you were able to spend her birthday with her.

[MadLuv]

Gosh Treasur- it was a sad yet sweet read on your mom. Reading your story on your mom it brought to mind how much loss has happened. I lost both my parents to cancer and my Dad’s  went into his brain. When he would talk towards the end he would say street names from his childhood state rather than the ones he was living in now, which made driving directions difficult from him, except for me. I always knew what street converted to the other. One day he wanted a can from
Sears. My step monster ( did not like) brought him tools, paint etc. he was so frustrated. My sister was visiting him and called me as I lived in another state. They were both crying. He was yelling at them in frustration and they didnt know what he wanted and right away I knew. I said, get him can of coke from the fridge. It was bought at sears. They did and he said simply, thanks, that’s all I wanted. So, I think of that always. That even when lost I saw him and knew him and understood him. Just like you see you mom now in a look. Those moments will bring you a life time of comfort.