I think we’re, as a whole, tougher than we think we are.
I read an article a while back, about the resilience of the mind. It was a discussion looking into how people cope with such trauma (devastating loss like above, surviving a warzone [as military or civilian], etc). Here’s the article, if you want; it’s 6 pages, but you’d need to read the 6 pages, because it explores more than trying to declare. It covers various research and theories on mind, all the ways people are trying to help/understand/explain/eliminate reactions to trauma, and whether the attempts are actually helping, or even (always) necessary. I think it’s an interesting read.
Its title, and one of the more prominent premises: we generally make it through without glaring scars, that we may have an innate emotional resilience, even if we don’t explicitly ‘understand’ it yet in methods of thought like psychology.
Evidence shows that people have huge variety of grieving/coping, that it’s not a uniform set of stages; that most people, most of the time, will recover on their own, in their own way, and that’s okay; that we may be doing more harm by making people re-live the events through painful ‘cathartic’ sessions, by trying to fit them into a pattern, by treating them like they’re about to break, need to be fixed, need to be led by hand, etc. We will, generally, be okay, somehow.
Not that this father’s loss doesn’t hurt like more than hell. It does. Or should I say it must—can’t imagine, either.
And ‘okay’ doesn’t mean splendid or like nothing ever happened. It just means okay.
I think… we feel like we’re going to break, die, and feel like we want to, as well. But it’s not a monotone of that feeling, its intense waves we manage to wade through. Except that’s not quite it, because we’re the waves, too, crashing and reforming and finding that maybe we’re a little saliter now. We still feel a pull of rhythm, and eventually—in our own way, our own time, we’ll find a new way to dance.