Grief Recovery Institute Featured Question - The ending of a very short relationship can be totally devastating. (Published 9/9/2014)

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The ending of a very short relationship can be totally devastating. (Published 9/9/2014)

I met someone last year around this time, our love was short lived but filled with some of the happiest hours of my life. He died in an unfair way. I have cried, prayed, talked, read about death and I still cry easily when I think of him. Do we learn to live with the grief or does it go away? I don’t want to forget him. Sometimes it feels I'm still in love with a spirit and it will be hard for me to move on because he was everything I had prayed for. I've since stayed to myself more because I feel my friends and family don't understand me. How does this work?! I have children who depend on me, but I find myself longing to be with him.

A Grief Expert Replies:

Dear Cecy,

Thanks for your note and questions.

Unfair sometimes is the only right word.

You finally found the person who we’d guess you might call your soul mate, and he gets wrenched away from you—and in an unfair way on top of it all.

Crying is perfectly okay. But reading about death is not going to help your broken heart. And you don’t want to learn how to live with grief, what you want to do is to learn how to discover and complete everything that his death left emotionally unfinished for you.

Typically when someone important to us dies, we’re left with a host of things we wish had been different, better, or more; and with unrealized hopes, dreams, and expectations about the future.

In your situation, we’d imagine that it is mostly those unrealized hopes, dreams, and expectations that affect you over and over.

Go to the library or bookstore and get a copy of The Grief Recovery Handbook. As you read it and take the actions it outlines, you’ll see how it helps you with deal with all those things that aren’t going happen because his untimely death robbed you— and him— of the future. Hopefully, you’ll begin to be able to participate more fully in life again and be able to be available to your children.

From our hearts to yours,

Russell And John

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The ending of a very short relationship can be totally devastating. (Published 9/9/2014)

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