6 Months of Grief Project: Day 77

Manicured Hoisting

This is Day 77 of my #6MonthsOfGrief Project. To learn more about this practice, feel free to visit Day One, where I explain this project in more detail.

I am a weightlifter. When my husband suddenly passed away, I only took two months off before I went back to the gym. I meant to take longer than that, but my body started craving it. My heart was crying out for it. I cried a lot while lifting, those first few months back in the gym. Thanks to the great community my coach has fostered at his amazing gym, there was a lot of space for my tears and my sorrow. I have consistently continued to lift throughout my grief journey. Now with my new job, I have to lift pretty early in the morning. I'm also dealing with a shoulder injury that is healing but extremely slowly, so I can't do any overhead lifting which is my favorite. Instead I'm doing lots and lots and lots of squats.

Sometimes I feel so broken down, physically and emotionally that I feel like I will never lift a heavy weight again, but I gather up all my stuff and I trundle off to the gym in the wee morning hours and I start lifting. I laugh with my friends and by the end, even if all I did was lots of squats, I feel accomplished - and the day has barely gotten started!

They say it takes 3 weeks to get used to big changes in life, and today marks the completion of the third week of my new schedule of lifting at 6:30am, doing a fast costume change and commuting to work for an 8 1/2 hour day, then commuting back home. I don't know if I'm used to my new life yet, but I did notice my nails matched the weights this morning, so I took a picture. 

One step at a time. One day at a time. Just keep moving forward.

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I am very aware that this project can bring up a lot around yours or other's grief and loss, I will always follow every post with some online grief support resources that have helped me. Please feel free to let me know of online support that you have found healing in your grief, as well:

Art with Grief:

• Photographer [Sarah Treanor] Takes Moving Self-Portraits to Cope with Her Fiance's Death by Jillian Wong
• When the Fall Comes, a film about Grief by Adriana Marchione
• Self-Portraits: Expressing Emotion Through Art on What's Your Grief?
• The Hard Romance of Grief by Mark Liebenow
• The poetry of John O’Donohue

Resources for Widows:

• Widowed Village
• Camp Widow

• Soaring Spirits International

Living with Grief Resources:

• Modern Loss's excellent resource list
• Grief Bibliography on Grief Healing

• Teresa “TL” Bruce's What to Say When Someone Dies
• They Brought Cookies: For A New Widow, Empathy Eases Death's Pain by Ann Finkbeiner on NPR
• A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit

• Megan Devine’s Refuge in Grief

• The Geography of Sorrow: Francis Weller on Navigating Our Loses, interviewed by Tim McKee in Sun Magazine

• How to Be a Friend in Deed by Bruce Feiler in the New York Times

• 12 Things to Know About the First Year of Grieving Someone You Can’t Live Without by Laurie Costanza in Elephant Magazine

And remember, I am sharing this project on a variety of platforms, including my Instagram, Twitter, & Facebook feeds, as well as my Pinterest page on Grief. I use the hashtag #6MonthsOfGrief, so it can easily be found on any platform. Please share this project with anyone you think might need it.

Thank you, and see you tomorrow.