Remember the days when we needed permission to do just about anything, first, from parents, and then from others?
Permission was doled out according to some kind of mysterious and unwritten system. It seems to me that we never outgrow the need to please those closest to us.
It took me some time before I recognized the fact that people need permission to bring back some level of normalcy into their lives. I use the word normalcy in the context of having some joy and fun.
However, we don’t wake up one morning and feel that we have been given permission to do this or that. It is more of a subtle understanding that life is good, there is much beauty in our lives, there is music, there are friends that help us, and there are new possibilities to explore.
This is what I mean by “permission”. So we share our stories, our hopes, our disappointments and our expectations for our lives and in so doing we see that we are not unique. We are then encouraged to live our lives a bit more fully; we learn from the stories of our friends and as life goes on we learn once more to laugh and to enjoy life as it is given to us.
Although the deaths of our loved ones will always be with us, the time that we gave ourselves to feel the pain and struggle of grief was, in retrospect, the best gift of all.
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