Read books on grief and loss
Yes. With some provisos.
Grief can be the weirdest thing that you have ever encountered, particularly since our society refuses to talk about it. It can make you feel like you might be going crazy. Getting some information on what grief is, and what you might expect, is probably a very good thing. Yes, you can get help from grief counsellors, and grief support groups, but there are some problems. It's hard to tell whether counsellors actually have experience with, or training in, grief, aside from those who do work with hospice societies. Those who do work with hospice societies tend to be in high demand, so you may have a long wait time to get started. Grief support groups are more available, but many societies running the groups have requirements that you have had at least some counselling before getting into a group, so, once again, there may be a delay in availability.
Books are immediately available. But, like counsellors, it can be difficult to tell which books can be helpful, just because it has "grief" in the title. As a resource for the hospice society for which I volunteer, I have started a bibliography of grief books (as well as bibliographies for caregiving and end-of-life care). All of the titles listed in the bibliographies have full reviews linked to them, so that you can get details of what the books might be good for.
Eat healthy
Yeah, it's a good idea. But possibly easier said than done.
Yes, any major disturbance in your life, and grief is definitely a disturbance, requires that you have the best physical resources that you can. This includes health, this includes sleep, and this includes a healthy diet. Yes, diet and exercise is generally helpful in pretty much any situation. So, yes, eat healthy is not exactly bad advice.
However, simply saying eat healthy may not be terribly helpful to a lot of people. We are, after all, talking about grief here. And, specifically for men, you may never have had to consider what a healthy diet is. If you are grieving because you have lost your wife, you may have lost the person who has cooked for you, for possibly the majority of your life. So, how are you supposed to even know what a healthy diet is?
And, as someone who does know how to cook, and who did the majority of the cooking during the time of our marriage, I can tell you that eating healthy, and preparing healthy meals, is harder than it sounds. If you are grieving, very likely you are at least partially depressed, and you are probably having difficulty just getting through the day. In the initial stages of grief, you are using pretty much all of the energy and resources that you have, just grieving, and surviving the grief. You don't have time to think about meals. You don't have the energy to consider, in detail, how to eat, and what kind of a diet is best for you. And, certainly, you want to take the easiest path to having a meal.
The easiest path, unfortunately, isn't particularly healthy.
Our society provides us with quick and easy meals, that aren't particularly healthy. Overly processed food is readily available, and it tends to be fairly cheap, partly because it also tends to have a long shelf life, and therefore it's easy to manage it once you buy it and get it home. You can simply open a box, or a bag, or a package, and start eating. A lot of the stuff doesn't need to be refrigerated, and, even after you open a bag, it can stay on the shelf after you have satisfied your immediate hunger, until the next time you are hungry.
But, while it is easy, and relatively inexpensive, and easy to manage, in terms of being available when you are hungry, it's not a healthy diet.
It tends to be high in starch, and sugar, and salt, and the types of fats that aren't particularly good for you.
Healthy foods tend to be vegetables. They also tend to be fresh. Even when they are prepared, in some way, that gives them a longer shelf life, they, those materials, because they are nutritious, tend to grow things that are bad for you, like mold. These types of foods, that are good for you, tend to go bad, over time. They tend to have to be refrigerated. You have to remember when you bought them. You have to keep checking them, to see how old they are. You also have to keep checking them to see if they are growing mold, or smelling bad.
They also tend to be more expensive. Because they tend to go bad, they have a shelf life, and because they have a shelf life, they have greater requirements for being freshly harvested, prepared, and shipped to market. And all of that costs money. So food that is healthy for you tends to be more expensive than food that isn't particularly good for you.
And food that is good for you tends to have to be prepared. You need to have a variety of foods to have a healthy diet. Even if you are eating vegetables, and a lot of vegetables can be eaten raw, they still have to be peeled, and scraped, or scrubbed, and cut up into bite sized pieces. So food that is healthy for you tends to be a lot more trouble to prepare.
This is hard, and it takes effort.
And then there's even more effort in figuring out what mix of foods, all of which require different preparation methods, you should be eating in order to have a healthy diet.
So, yes, eating healthy is a good idea. But just saying to people "eat healthy" isn't particularly helpful.
Take a road trip
In general this would seem to come under the category of a distraction. And, as I have pointed out, a distraction, and anything that might be pleasurable, is probably good.
It's also something new. Going on a trip generally gives you something new to see, or encounter, or experience. And anything new, and learning anything new, is probably a good idea. You are faced with an entirely new situation, and your life has changed from what it was. Learning something new helps you in the process of learning a new life. It's practice for building a new life, and so it's helpful in that regard.
But simply, randomly, going on a road trip, or taking a vacation, or even going to visit friends or family, can be really difficult. After Gloria died, a lot of people suggested that I take various types of trips. A relative who really liked going on cruise ships suggested that I go on a cruise. I'd never gone on a cruise in my life, either with Gloria, or before I met her. I (still) have no idea of what to do or expect on a cruise. Other friends kept on inviting me to come and stay with them. Yes, I'm sure that going to see them, in their home, which I hadn't been to, would have provided some new sensations. But it also means that I have to move, I have to plan the trip, I have to do the actual traveling, and then I'm stuck in their situation, and their schedule of life, and I'm already facing a major change in my *own* life. I don't look forward to putting in an awful lot of effort, and then being stuck for several days following someone else's rules and ideas of how you should live. I am already in a situation where the way I thought life should work isn't working.
One cousin did come to visit. And then suggested that they wanted to go on a road trip to somewhere nearby. It's definitely a tourist destination, and, in fact, even though it was only a couple of hours drive, I hadn't gone there. They invited me to come along. That way I didn't have to do anything. I just had to sit in the car for the ride. They did the driving, and it was only going to be a day trip, so it wasn't any major commitment of time. I enjoyed it. It was very nice of them.
So, yes, some type of trip could be helpful. As a distraction, or simply for the novelty of it, and the practice in encountering new situations and adapting to them.
But, as with so many other items on this list, it's easy to say, and not so easy to do.
And, once again, it would be very nice for somebody to do this for you, but it's harder than it sounds to do it for yourself.
Learn a new skill
Yes, this is a good idea.
As I say, you are facing a change in your life. Probably a very major change in your life. Doing anything new helps with what psychologists call neuroplasticity. This is the ability of your brain to adapt to know skills, new situations, new requirements; pretty much anything new in your life. Building neuroplasticity by learning something new is a good idea. It will help you adapt to your new life situation.
(And, once again, it might be easier to say than to do. So, don't beat yourself up if you can't do it right away.)
Focus on what’s left, not what’s lost
Okay, in general, possibly a good thing. Being positive (or, more importantly, not constantly dwelling on the negative), is, overall, a good thing. If you can do it.
But this is just *way* too close to toxic positivity for me to recommend it to anyone who is actually grieving.
No comments:
Post a Comment