Monday, October 28, 2019

Death and Grief

I've had a lot of loss in my life. Going through grad school now, we've obviously touched on death quite frequently because I'm focusing on working with older adults. While the only topic to do with older adults isn't death, it is a topic that likely will come up because older adults are starting to experience more death. I've read quite a few articles about how people my age are less likely to experience death. In fact, one of the articles even said people have fewer children now because you don't need to have as many. Fewer children are going to die during infanthood and childhood. This makes me feel abnormal in the fact that I have experienced death while there still are likely people my age who have not. I have no grandparents anymore. I grew up on a farm where we had a lot of animals die. We had suicides in my school, as I've mentioned before. The list goes on, and yet the hardest death I've ever experienced was when my dog died.

Let me get this straight, I'm not okay with most of the death I've experienced in life. The farm animals are an exception to this because we got them knowing we would be butchering them. We weren't allowed to build ties to the lambs until they were at least a week old because we had so many lambs died. No names were allowed until they were a week old. The poultry wasn't allowed names unless it was like "barbecue chicken" or something food related. I think this helped us to understand death and was great for us to experience with animals whom were weren't fully attached to. However, this didn't help me with my grief of the loss of my grandparents, my dog, or even the students at my school. I wasn't close to the students, but there is definitely some grief work (and lots of trauma work) that I still probably should do.

I like the description of grief like a ball in a box with a pain button. Some days the ball is big and hits the button often, and others it is small. I have a lot of days where the ball is big. It's a struggle to get through those days and keep it together. My dog was whom died most recently, and we are well over a year from his death. I can see pictures of him and be fine. Videos with his bark though? Hell no. Tears will happen and the ball will be gigantic.With my grandmothers, I'm pretty okay. I dearly miss them but I didn't live with them. It's not like a gaping hole is missing all the time, just at some times whereas the hole Weeble left is always very obvious.

So my dog died in March and over the next summer, I came across a Snapchat of a dog named Queso who was not eating. I became extremely invested to this dog's recovery because this is what my dog had started to do as he died. He refused to eat for the last week or so before we took him in. We tried everything to get him to eat, and that's exactly what this family did as well. Just watching Queso struggle with life helped me through my grieving process. I had watched the same struggle with my dog, but we couldn't do anything. We knew the time was coming and just kept him as comfortable as possible until we couldn't anymore. Queso wasn't in the same boat as my dog though and I got to see her live. Eventually, they found out Queso had eaten a toy and removed it. However, Queso sucked me into their life and following the family. They had 5 dogs at the time I found them and had Snapchat, Instagram, Twitter, and a podcast. They probably have a Facebook too, but I don't use Facebook on my phone so I don't use it often.

Since I've started following them, they gained another dog and then lost 2 dogs. They've gone through their grief process with anyone who follows their accounts and listens to their podcast. They are extremely open about their grief. Following their grief process has been so helpful for me with going through my own grief process. Grief never ends and they don't make it seem like it has to. They still talk about all their old dogs and still grieve. It may not have been long now since they lost Maggie and Riley, but I don't believe they will stop openly grieving. I don't believe silently grieving is really the answer either though so I hope they never stop openly grieving as long as they feel grief.

I'm pretty open about who has died. I talk about my dead dog often, especially when people ask about my dog or tell me Monte is my dog. I always tend to respond with my dog is dead. I'm more than willing to talk about him even though he's dead. My family doesn't talk often about my grandparents. It's not a taboo subject though. We can bring up my grandparents as much as we want. If we are ever in the neighborhood of my grandmother's house, we always drive by and comment on what has changed.

My family does use humor to handle death and we joke about death a lot. Even when my grandmother, my mum's mother, was dying, we joked about it. She went into the hospital once during her battle with cancer, and I remember we made a lot of jokes about her being pregnant. They had to do an ultrasound. She was in the hospital because she had gotten extremely light headed. I don't remember if she had passed out or not. Both to my family could be construed as possible signs of pregnancy so that was the joke while we waited for tests to come back.

Grieving never stops. The pain will lessen, though it will be more painful on some days, but those days will lessen. None of the people or my dog that I have lost are really gone. They live on in my memories and my heart #cheesy. I wouldn't trade my memories with them just to take the grief away because the memories are so wonderful.

Anyhoo, that's my grief post. Grief sucks. It's all around us. If you're looking for an amazing podcast about dogs and ramblings (which sometimes touches on grief and is the dog podcast/social media accounts I discussed above), I highly recommend the Golden Ratio Podcast. I get a lot of comments from my family that I talk about the Golden Ratio all the time now. Honestly, I do and I don't find a problem with discussing it at all. The podcast has helped with my grief process, so yeah I'm going to share what I've learned from the podcast (even though it's normally not directly related to grief).

Friday, October 18, 2019

The Good Life

In my mental health journey, I've lost interest in a lot of things that I used to love. I'm not going to make a list, because I'm honestly not sure what all I lost interest in, but I do know I lost interest in horses for awhile. Like I never stopped loving them and I greatly miss my own ponies but I lost interest in horse knowledge and just all things horse related. I lost interest in being in that community. I would say now I am on a journey to rediscovering my love of horses. I also need to rediscover my confidence around horses.

I've begun to follow more horse related content on social media. I work at an equestrian center. I reconnected with an old friend and occasionally ride her horses or help out with chores. Horse memes have definitely helped me rediscover my horse love because I relate to so many of them. I have found some amazing horse lovers on Instagram, who further instill my love for horses. My interest coming back can be portrayed pretty easily by some recent dreams I have had. I dreamed of the return of Party Pooper, one of my ponies. Then, Marble Cake came back as well and there was a wonderful reunion between the two. Sure, it might have been a dream about loss since I will likely never see the two again. But it could also mean that my interest is coming back and my dreams are even focusing on horses now.

This weekend, I attended an event where a small organization for retired racehorses had built a fence. Most of the horses had never been in the big, grassy pasture and if they had, they weren't running loose but rather had a rope and halter on with a human attached to the rope. Otherwise, the horses stayed in a dry lot with lots of hay and an electric fence. I didn't actually count the horses, but there was probably around 30 all in the dry lot. Seeing the thrill as the horses ran through the pasture for the first time was an incredible experience.
Photo Cred: My little sister
There's just something about watching horses run that is so comforting, soothing, peaceful. They are so free and it's just beautiful. As I continue rediscovering myself and my interests, I'm sure horses will continue to amaze me. I hope to never lose the wonder horses cause again. I hope to never lose contact with horses either, though I'm sure that will become more of a challenge if I never move away from my home. I would love to own my own horse again someday. As I was telling my little sister today, two dogs, one horse and a mini as a companion for the horse is the dream life for me. Here's to getting there 🍻

Monday, October 14, 2019

Reality vs Thoughts/Dreams

"what dreams may come" by ben.chaney.archive is licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 2.0 
I don't have anything pressing to say. I'm feeling pretty healthy with my avoidance of work and school. Not that I'm really avoiding work. I changed my email settings so I don't get notifications on my phone though since I don't have set hours. I need to have my job not be a 24/7 job so it's time to set some boundaries. I told the volunteers to text me if it's urgent and now I don't read my work emails unless I'm devoting some time to work. For school, I'm just pulling back from classes. My classes are overwhelming still so I'm just doing the minimum work. I want to get as much out of my education as possible, but my mental health comes first. If I'm able to keep up where I've been at for the last week or so, I think I can actually make it to May. But anyhoo, here's a random topic for this week's post:

Part of my identity is a storyteller. I love telling stories and making them as outrageous as possible. My wattpad account can testify to that. My mind tends to be swarming with stories and it's hard to shut off. I've adapted to the point where I don't shut off my stories. When I'm ready for bed, I allow my mind to tell me a bedtime story and see where it takes me. Often times, the story does not end while I'm conscious and will follow me into my dreams. I also daydream a lot, especially when I'm driving alone. Most of my driving daydreams have to do with what disaster could occur while I'm driving. Probably a terrible thing to be daydreaming about considering it makes me anxious, but I don't fight my mind on stories. If it wants to bring up the possibility of a deer running into my car and doing some pretty major damage, then so be it.

Now, because I always seem to be in story mode, it's hard to separate out reality from my mind. For example, this morning I woke up to a very vivid dream of searching for my cello case after an alumni concert in which I discovered I wasn't completely terrible at playing the cello. Weird, I know. My cello case was painted a really bright yellow, which made it even weirder considering I would never paint it yellow. However, while I was dreaming, it felt very real. Almost like it could have happened before. This probably isn't a great example actually because I'm very aware this one was a dream not reality.

I often have more problems with thoughts or daydreams than actual dreams. I often have full conversations with people in my head to test out how the conversation may go or if the conversation is even okay. Let me tell you, I can't keep straight whether I had that conversation with the person or not then. I tend to ask people questions numerous times because I have no clue if I said it out loud or just in my head. Even if they responded, doesn't mean I know if it was an out loud conversation or a conversation in my head. It doesn't help that I don't have a good memory.

Positivity thought/idea/whatever: I read 2 books this last week and it was just wonderful to escape everything for awhile. Goes along great with my reality vs thoughts/dreams problem since coming out of book mode is extremely hard. I look forward to NaNoWriMo when it's my book that will be filling my mind instead of books I'm currently reading. My sister and I also watched 6 movies this weekend. We had 6 from the library but ended up only watching 4 because her DVD player decided to break mid-movie. Now I need to finish watching On the Basis of Sex but can't!