2024 Author: Harry Day | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 15:43
While you are young, socially active - you go to work, bring up children, do your favorite hobby, when your spouse, and maybe even your parents, are alive, life feels most complete, with its continuous flow, and death seems to be something distant and unreal.
When everything goes according to plan and measured, life looks like a complete picture, but when something unexpected, unplanned happens, such as a divorce, illness of a loved one, loss, then the picture seems to lose separate fragments. This state of violation of inner integrity is described by a person as a feeling of emptiness.
That is, a person had a certain part of life in the person of a loved one who performed certain functions: moral support, help in everyday matters, joint leisure, ensuring stability and mental serenity, let's say.
And when a loved one leaves, then the person remains with himself, and the functions of the loved one now fall on him along with the burden of loneliness and unfulfilled hopes.
This emptiness reminds of itself with the usual places where people were together. So the widow, arriving at the dacha, which they built together with her husband, recalls how he worked on it, what he did, what he dreamed of, what he wanted … Now it all seemed to be orphaned. And the widow herself, bending over the beds, resembles an orphaned child abandoned by a parent. Yes, there are children, but they have their own life, their own family, their own habits and principles. A widowed parent may initially feel alienated, unnecessary for their children and grandchildren.
Children and grandchildren in their own way feel emptiness, it can be a feeling of concern about the loneliness of a parent, a feeling of the need to cheer, fill the void that has arisen in the life of a loved one.
The family is a single system, and if some element fails, it somehow affects the functioning of the entire system. It takes time to adapt, so that the emptiness from the loss of a loved one is filled with new meanings, so that after a year of mourning, bright sadness remains, but the quality of life is not lost.
With the loss of a loved one, you do not need to give up your hobbies in any case, continue to do what you like to the best of your ability, do not stop social life.
When it comes to a parent, it is necessary to provide him with acceptance and support, to make it clear that he is not alone.
If you are an elderly person without relatives, it is important to continue your social life: contacts with friends, neighbors, hobbies, walks, and possibly moving to a nursing home, where you can meet many people with similar difficulties, find some kind of community. A similar case was described by Irwin Yalom in the book "Peering into the Sun", when an elderly woman after the death of her husband did not want to sell their common house, imagining how a new family would move into it and begin to redo everything in it. Her opinion changed when she remembered how she and her husband had once bought this house from an elderly woman who had buried her husband, and the first thing they did was to renovate it in their own way. Selling the house to which she held for many years, she felt free for the first time. The woman moved to a nursing home, where she found new acquaintances. She and her husband had no children.
I will cite a couple more quotes from I. Yalom's book that I liked.
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