Living Without Brenna

I got this from M at The Maybe Baby (Babies) who got it from Dana at Probable Impossibilities.

"A lecturer when explaining stress management to an audience, raised a glass of water and asked 'How heavy is this glass of water?' Answers called out ranged from 20g to 500g. The lecturer replied, 'The absolute weight doesn't matter. It depends on how long you try to hold it. If I hold it for a minute, that's not a problem. If I hold it for an hour, I'll have an ache in my right arm. If I hold it for a day, you'll have to call an ambulance. In each case, it's the same weight, but the longer I hold it, the heavier it becomes.' He continued, 'And that's the way it is with stress management. If we carry our burdens all the time, sooner or later, as the burden becomes increasingly heavy, we won't be able to carry on.''

That is exactly how it is with grief. If we do not let go, we will not be able to carry it, and it will bring us down. Letting go does not mean we don't love our children. We are not betraying their memory by letting our grief go. We are not forgetting them. We don't have to be sad and depressed to miss our babies. I will miss Brenna everyday of my life. But I don't have to be holed up in my house to miss her. I don't have to deny myself joy to miss her. I will miss her anyway. Happy or not. I will miss her. Punishing myself is not going to make me miss her more (or less). It's just going to make me feel worse. And it's going to make me a miserable human being.

Instead, I choose to think of her fondly, miss her always, and let my grief go.