Fiction works as well, just something that will get me through this fixation I’m having. I’m taking care of my grandma and she’s getting a bit worse and I’m the one who lives with her so I know I’ll be the one super close to her when she passes. I’m having trouble knowing I’ll be able to cope when that happens – I also have a lot of close family who are pretty old and in poor health. It’s pretty much certain sometime in the near future will be a period where I am losing people left and right, and I don’t know if I am equipped to cope.
by mushroomterra
2 Comments
The best source I can give you for this is actually a film, Shadowlands, about Narnia author CS Lewis’s experience on the actual loss of a woman he never expected to love.
Essentially he felt that the price of loving someone was the inextricably connected pain when losing them to death.
The greater the benefit of the loved experience the greater the loss. Essentially you can’t have one without the other. This was particularly useful in post war Europe where so many experienced catastrophic emotional losses.
A very useful book might be “What Happened to You” by Oprah Winfrey and expert in psychology and victimization whose name eludes me. Google it if curious.
Its value is in that it talks about how difficult experiences we have had at certain ages, impact our emotional state and that this impacts how we react to life, what anxieties we have, etc.
I’m so sorry! You could perhaps try A Man called Ove by Fredrik Backman.