Boarding a flight, Lisa Niemi pulled out her phone and texted "I love you” to her husband. It was a sentiment she'd often shared with her partner of 34 years, actor Patrick Swayze. And even though he'd lost his battle to pancreatic cancer a year ago this week, she wasn't ready to give it up. “Either somewhere out there he received [the message], or someone's going, 'Somebody loves me!' And you know what? I figured it was a win-win situation,” revealed Niemi in an interview with People Magazine.
“I have a client who never turned off her husband’s cell phone after he died. She takes comfort in calling his voice mail to hear him speak,” says Claire Bidwell Smith, M.A., L.P.C., a hospice and bereavement specialist. “Rituals and routines like that are actually healthy in confronting your emotions and can hold a person in a secure place for longer.”
Actress Michelle Williams echoed the sentiment in the months after Heath Ledger’s death. "I wish we had rituals about grief," she said in an interview with Vogue. "I wish it were still the Victorian times, and we could go from black to gray to mauve to pink, and have rings with hair in them.”
read more at Yahoo Reading
I echoed Michelle Williams in this. There is no unwritten rules/rituals about grief. Some take a south way to muddle through and some may go north. It is never a Yes or No situation or Do's and Dont's, and there is no fine line to distinguish the two. Inevitably some may cross the border and do something that community may perceive as Dont's but heck who are we to judge and say that ones shouldnt do the certain things as their way to grief. I once heard a story about a wife who never wash his husband clothes just to have this comfort of his smell when she needs it and her friends thought it was crazy. I cant blame her for being crazy, as being crazily in love with her husband led her to do such thing, and to me I thought its rather sweet and calming.
A lot of readings can be found today and this whole week about the brutal murder of Datuk Sosilawati. Yah, I know the whole country would want to be updated about whats going on with the case and the status of it. But has anyone ever wonder how does the family feels and coping with it? One that I can assure you is by having tonnes of reporter fencing their house's gates day and night to get the glimpse of the children and loaded reports on how the mother was brutally killed where 70% of it were merely assumptions and here say by some reporters will not help much on their mourning phases. I understand that is part of their job but we are human, we need some times to re-adjust and re-stabilise and adapt to the new situation.
*sigh*
We will never know when is our time to do such, nonetheless I believe we would much appreciate if we are allowed to take our own sweet time to let things go.
Part of the struggle comes from the fact that there's no time-line for the pain. Secret habits and rituals born out of loss can carry over for decades, even to the point where it becomes second nature.
I hope Malaysia would give the family their space and time to breath, for they sure are in need.
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