Missing a loved one

I wish I knew your number, I could talk all night about this. Alone in a (B”H)crowded house, and so sad.

am yisrael chai-

I can’t say it any better than “Climbing mountains” did.

Can you call your relatives and talk? We speak to our relatives in E”Y using Cucumber and it isn’t too expensive.

If that isn’t possible, can you go out with friends and just talk?

Since it’s erev Rosh Hashana, now’s a time that it isn’t unusual to call old friends you haven’t spoken to in a while – speaking to friends and relatives and catching up with them is a pretty good medicine for being lonely and alone with unhappy thoughts.

I hope things get better for you – have a k’siva va’chasima tova and a gut gebentched yor.

I have just completed the year of avelus for my mother. I can’t say I know how you feel because I don’t. We each experience a loss differently because our relationship with the nifter/nifteres is a special and individual experience. Even siblings have different and separate memories and emotions.

But I do know what it feels like to suffer a loss and to mourn that a loss. Yes it is sad and lonely and yes there is definitely a missing piece to our emotional puzzle. But as the year came to a close I had to shake off the sadness and stop mourning her death and start celebrating her life. The same way I gave tzedaka l’zecher nishmos, I have to do things in her name and to celebrate her life instead of concentrating on her death. I can’t just sweep everything that made up who she was into that small compartment that is “death”; she was alive and did so much good in her life. That is what I have to think about and honor. That is what I have to concentrate on. I can’t yearn for her hugs and kisses, I must remember them with love and joy. I can’t sit and cry about the things she told me, I have to go out and put them into practice and apply them to my own life. If I don’t look at anything else that she did, one thing I can look at is that she taught me well. She was the epitome of a good example and I must go on without her and follow her lead.

She was NOT as lucky as I was. i had her all my life until she reached the ripe age of 90. She shared my simchas, my nachas and my joy through the birth of my children, their weddings, and the birth of my grandchildren. Her mother died when she was just about 20 years old. B”H my grandmother did NOT fall into Nazi hands and was spared that horror, but my mother and her sisters and brothers lost their father when they were very small and cared for a sick mother in their teens. They had no parents by the time the Nazis reared their ugly heads. What my mother wouldn’t have given to have her own mother for just another day. Look how lucky I was to have my own mother till she was over 90 years old B”H. She taught me to have faith and bitachon in Hashem. She, a holocaust survivor who answered the question many times “how can you believe in G-d after what you went through?” And my mother would answer “How can I not?”.

So I quote her words, I smile at her memory, I throw her kisses to the wind. I hug the thought of her, I feel the warmth of her, I keep her in my heart so close and so near to me. She is always with me wherever I go. And I also do and behave in a way that she and my grandmother would be proud. Their lessons did not fall on deaf ears.

So AYC, what can you do to honor your friend’s memory and celebrate her life?

MODS – PLEASE PLEASE – CAN YOU CHANGE THE POST UNDER YUMMY CUPCAKE’S NAME TO BE UNDER MY NAME??? PLEASE? Being that i wrote that i can relate – i don’t want an ayin hara, chas v’shalom. so could you do us this big big favor? thank you so much.

AYC – I usually am careful to speak to my listener but since I dont know you this may be all wrong. If so, PLEASE forgive me. I just wanted to give you the answer I always give myself in these situations. In regard to what you said about not being able to find the simchas Hachayim and that was her essence – Every time I find myself on the threshold of a mitzvah or needing to be b’simcha (Yom tovim especially) I feel sucked in by the sadness of loss or hurt. And when the opportunity is over I can almost hear the yetzer hora say “mission accomplished” and I feel even worse. Tell yourself that you are going to let bits of her neshama live through you by smiling or thinking of a happy thought today, even momentarily, and know you are doing it special for her. She can get the zchus of your mitzva (simcha)and you will feel her living with you. It sometimes makes me feel closer. Bittersweet happy, but still better than the deep emptiness. And since I have been wallowing in sadness this whole week (so far), I guess I am really talking to myself.

ayc-i am so so sorry for your loss-only Hashem can comfort you because only he understands the relationship you had, your sensitivities, your heart, and may He comfort you b’soch shaar availay zion v’yerushalayim. Although the pain will lessen in its intensity, the terrible loss will be there for a long time. This doesn’t have to disable or freeze you- you will be strong, you will continue, the dear niftar would not want you to change the way you always lived in any way, if she had one more thing she could say, she would beg you to live, to use each day, each moment, to the fullest. May you only know true simcha from now on.

mod 20- ok, i just reposted. thanks so much!

B”H cant talk from personal experience but someone in our community just passed away. A young girl who was sick with cancer for 11 years. I cannot tell you how hard it is to think about it. and when i think about her family and the mourning and the pain I cant deal with it but I just wanna tell you that no matter how hard it is for you just think about the wonderful place that she is in now. She’s happy and in a place that’s painless totally.

May Hashem console you and all the rest of Klal Yisroel that’s suffering.

MODS!!! I REPOSTED – PLEASE PLEASE TAKE OFF YUMMY CUPCAKE’S POST. YOU SAID YOU WOULD REMOVE IT WHEN I REPOST. PLEASE – BEFORE YOM TOV – TAKE HERS OFF. THANK YOU SO MUCH.

HELLO????? MODS??????? PLEASE READ MY PREVIOUS POST AND REMOVE THE POST FROM YUMMY CUPCAKE!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! WHY HASN’T IT BEEN DONE YET? YOU’VE BEEN UPDATED THIS SITE – WHY NOT MY REQUEST?

sorry, I thought you were talking about your subtitles, since you wrote “under my name”. So I gave you her subtitle, having no idea what the big issue was.

Sorry, Gefen for the delay. I actually fell asleep on the job last night!

A Gut Year!

am yisroel chai and everyone else who is dearly missing a loved one – I cannot say anything more than what aries did so eloquently. I was also blessed to have my mother for 92 years and it is just 3 years since we lost her earthly body. I know that she is somewhere, still laughing and asking anyone under 60 if they are married, because has she “got someone for you”. After quite a long period of sadness when thinking of her, I am now able to laugh out loud when I think of the things that she said. I am now with my family in Toronto for the Yonmtovim and my daughter and I have mentioned her in our conversations several times daily – always with laughter because she loved to laugh and, as everyone called her, she was the lady with the million dollar smile. So, eventually things will get better and the good memories will overtake the bad ones. I know that it is difficult to believe at this time, but it will happen. I wish you a peaceful New Year.

The Chesed of the Ribbono Shel Olam is actually how we deal with death. It begins with the Shiva, shloshim etc. As the years distance us from the petira we feel a little better. Give yourself time and commit your feelings in a diary. I lost my baby brother about 10 years ago and my dad a little over 6 years. There is no rule book as to how you should feel, it is there and allow it to be there. This will ultimately assist your healing process. Acceptance is a huge part here. May the nifteres be a mailitz yoisher. A goed gebenchte year.

AYC, my thoughts are with you. Hakodosh Boruch Hu should give you strength to get thru this hard time for you. My outlook on loosing a loved one is , to accept your limitations. If these days are hard for you, accept it. Don’t fight the feelings. Flow with it. When you daven, tell G-d how you feel. sad, lonely. Some pple take longer than others to get past the pain. The family never forgets. wishing you and your family a gmar chasima tova.

AYC, I feel that the difference between sadness and mourning is that the sadness is normal. I can accept the loss and still miss my mother’s arms, her hugs and kisses, the things she said, just being with her and having her in my life. Mourning is more like the really huge pain, how can I go on without you feeling, what am I going to do without you, life will never be the same, etc.

Sadness and missing in small doses, is fine. It happens, real mourning that envelopes you and stagnates you is only fine in the very beginning stages of loss and then it is important to move through the rest of the stages.

In all honesty I don’t even know how I had the chutzpah to just walk in and announce that I was here to help them and “be” the PTA which they didn’t have, and how can I help you kids. But I guess, Hashem just guided me and threw me into it. I had no idea that it would lead me into mentoring and then coaching so many teens. More so, I co-parented and even took boys into my own home. It was quite amazing. Many of them became extensions of our own family, so I have additional children and grandchildren from them. They actually refer to my husband as Tatty.

I did make my own labels. It is really not important what I wrote, you get to write what is important to you. You can write “l’zecher nishmos a remarkable woman who had a tremendous heart and sensitive soul” and continue from there. You can speak about what a good role model she was, and how she was more like a sister to you, or a mother to you than an actual blood relative, etc. Or you can write a poem that expresses your emotions and then just put l’zecher nishmos….