{"id":547,"date":"2011-10-13T08:20:26","date_gmt":"2011-10-13T15:20:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/delightfilledart.wordpress.com\/?p=547"},"modified":"2016-01-26T23:10:03","modified_gmt":"2016-01-27T07:10:03","slug":"thoughts-on-loss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/?p=547","title":{"rendered":"Thoughts on loss"},"content":{"rendered":"

My experience with grieving is fortunately quite limited. I have lost all three of my grandparents since moving to British Columbia in 1999; all of them having lived full, long lives, with the final loss of my paternal grandmother on Friday.<\/p>\n

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Grandma and I in 2004 at my grandfather’s burial.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It happened on our wedding anniversary, 11 years, and the eve of my being responsible for an event at work – no time to take abrupt leave of absence or let down my guard. After that, I had only part of Thanksgiving Sunday to try to gather some meaningful words to share at the funeral, via my brother. That done, I turned my sights to a frenzy of home improvement projects – reupholstering a chair, completing reclaimed wood shelves and arranging things on them, and launching into fall cleaning.<\/p>\n

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Chair I reupholstered, on which I learned a thing or two about sewing and zippers.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

I commented that I didn’t know if this was appropriate behaviour for someone who just lost a loved one. My husband said that we all deal with grief in different ways. Now that I have a lot of the busyness out of my system, the more sentimental thoughts are starting to be processed. Not melodramatic, but the kind of important stock-taking thoughts that need to be thought at a time like this.<\/p>\n

When Grandpa passed away seven years ago, I was able to fly home for the funeral. Read my brothers’ words. Absorb the scenes of the farm and rural Ontarian community. As mentioned in an earlier post<\/a>, a lot of what I absorbed came out through my artwork since that time. This time, my brother read my words and I have been quite distant from the actual funeral proceedings.<\/p>\n

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View from my Grandparents house in 2004, just after Grandpa’s funeral.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

My thoughts have mainly been on the farm – partly because of my current painting<\/a>, an aerial abstract landscape of the farm – and partly because I can’t help but be connected to the land where generations of my family have lived. I was thinking about who lived in my grandparents’ house before they did, and it was Grandpa’s grandparents. I did a little research into who they were and of course got engrossed in the journals and letters I have. Discovered that my great-great grandfather was raised by an aunt and uncle (brother\/sister), kind of like Anne of Green Gables.<\/p>\n

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Fields, October 2004, colours of loss.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

So apparently I deal with grief by creating art, making things, organizing things, and keeping very busy. I’m hoping the next few days will be spent at a slower pace, letting this new existence sink in, having laid a generation to rest.<\/p>\n

Related posts: Grandpa<\/a>‘s story; A Letter from 1924<\/a>; For Grandma<\/a>; In Memory of Grandma<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My experience with grieving is fortunately quite limited. I have lost all three of my grandparents since moving to British Columbia in 1999; all of them having lived full, long lives, with the final loss of my paternal grandmother on … Continued<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4720,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"kt_blocks_editor_width":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[33],"tags":[326,350,463,496,498,504,505,608,625,695,722,805,818,874,896],"class_list":["post-547","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-genealogy-2","tag-creating","tag-death","tag-funeral","tag-grandmother","tag-grandparents","tag-grief","tag-grieving","tag-loss","tag-memories","tag-october","tag-painting","tag-reclaimed-wood","tag-reupholstering","tag-shelves","tag-soybeans"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=547"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/547\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/4720"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=547"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=547"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.nancyduckhildebrand.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=547"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}