My Grief Mentor

By Emma Pearson

March 29, 2024

Megan Devine Writing Your Grief Prompt: We all need a mentor. Especially inside this wholly disorienting grief, inside a culture that cannot and does not understand. We each need a guiding star, an example to live into.

18th September 2019 (my mum’s 80th birthday)

This is my third crack at this writing prompt. I have just re-read times one (May 2017) and two (April 2018), and I am in awe of my resilience, resourcefulness and positivity at those times.

May 2017 was just a month after Mike died, and April 2018 was just a year afterwards. I end version two saying, “I am my wise woman”.  And while, since then, Julia my youngest daughter has died by suicide, which puts me way below where things ever were at their worst with the loss of Mike, I still feel the same.

I am my guiding star.

I am my wise woman.

I am the person to whom I look to fathom how to live a life inside grief.

For I hold dear the notion that grief=love=grief=love=grief=love…

And I hold dear an image that my love is wrapped in grief and my grief is wrapped in love.

I believe that I make a conscious choice many moments of every day to turn towards life, to turn towards love.

Yes, for sure I have been fortunate to find a sweet Medjool who helps me to live and breathe that new love, but perhaps too I found him because I had made that choice. I worked with a healer yesterday who told me, “You found Neil because you chose to live and you chose to love”. And I choose to believe her.

So while there are other people who guide and steer and support and soothe and love me in my Grief, I know that I do much of the heavy lifting with myself, for myself.

Grief is lonely.

And while it happens to everyone, you feel it alone.

Shocking loss isn’t to be shared.

Cannot be shared.

It’s one of the weirdest contradictions of living with grief. It happens to everyone, but you do it alone.

I am glad that I am my own guiding star. And I don’t care if it sounds arrogant.

About Emma Pearson

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