Supporting

Healing after losing the one you love is not really about moving on. It’s about honoring and it’s about remembering.

It’s also about finding joy. A word I am flinging around these days as if it were a flag to the future.

It is important. Significantly, it also helps to continue to support others going through this journey with Lewy (and other dementias.)

I know that as time passes and I am no longer involved in that day to day of care, my advice will be dulled. My support will not.

I have acquired a new and different perspective. It’s the perspective of full-on mourning.

I still maintain that there is nothing ambiguous about your grief as you watch your loved one lose his faculties. But, the loss of Burt, entirely, is a different kind and degree.

So I can mourn and celebrate who he was, what he meant to me, both in the before and the after of Lewy. I can mourn and celebrate what he means to me, now, after he’s gone.

I can honor him by supporting others who are still on this sad, difficult journey.