Amy Kennedy The Creative Crone

I am feeling messy and not ready and surprisingly heartbroken. Or, maybe the heartbreak feeling is not so surprising, because I’ve been down this road before: State Highway of Grief.

I was looking through old journals because I have a habit of writing ideas in random journals and then an even better, much more ingrained habit of forgetting all about them. So, looking for any abandoned ideas I found something I wrote about grief (and about my mom) and it opened everything up again. How some days I miss her to my bones and how I felt as if I didn’t have enough time with her.

My mom died July 4th 2019, she would have been 97 on August 1st of the same year. Not only that, but she was a multi-published author, an award winning public speaker (her last gig was October of 2018 when she decided to retire), a wonderful mom, a great friend, and the list goes on and on. So, you know, quite the life.

I and my sisters had the privilege to be with her and care for her the last weeks of her life. Logic would say: you’re good, closure, love, etc.–fucking etc.

But is it ever enough time and are there ever no regrets?

I have no answers. What I do have is thinking about my own mortality and how I could make it easier for my family and friends (everything’s fine, I’m not planning on dying anytime soon), just observations, some my mom was a wiz at and some not so much.

~ Believe in your mortality and make appropriate plans (ie: which mortuary, is your choice cremation, burial, something different, what kind of service would you want?). Mom had paid for cremation services, this really helped.

~Use the good stuff. Mom did a talk on this–it’s a long story to be shared at a later date 🙂

~Have faith in your ability to succeed in the thing you really want to do. In other words, don’t dilute your energies with your Plan Bs. Mom created a Train the Trainer for people to lead groups through a multi-day workshop on goal-setting, affirmations, mindset, time management, etc. she sold it and could have marketed it further and sold it wider, but instead she became a home aide (which is a fine profession) to get a secure paycheck–she didn’t value her own product.

~Once you birth something, nurture it so it can grow and thrive, don’t set it aside for the next shiny thing. Mom wrote a number of books, once they were written and for sale, she was on to the next thing–which is great, but you don’t ignore the first child when you have a second one.

~Face your life–lean into your own pain. Write it out, talk it out, share it in order to work through it. Mom got better at this toward the end, but her generation were never taught to feel their feelings or god forbid TALK about trauma they’d experienced.

~Share your wisdom with as many people and in as many different ways as you’re capable. Mom was so generous with her wisdom I wish I had helped her to spread it even further.

~Don’t let people tell you what it is you want to do. This is as much for me as it is for mom, sometimes we listen to too many people’s ideas about what we should be doing and how we should be doing it and not to our own hearts and minds and guts.

~Ask questions. As much time as I had with mom, I still didn’t ask enough questions and neither did she.

Something happened while I was writing this–my grief was interrupted. I ended up painting the frame of a door and then slow dancing with my husband to “A Sunday Kind of Love” by Etta James. Interruptions can be good sometimes. They can also make you forget how you were going to wrap-up this whole thing.

Thinking about these things are helping me with this little surprise package of grief–I haven’t honored some of these the best I could, so now I have a purposeful grief…is that a thing? Perhaps.

Are you ever surprised by grief? What have you done to honor it?

Be brave and love each other, Amy