10 Signs You are Ready To Move Forward After Grief

I don’t know about you but it bothered me when people would say that it was time that I moved forward.  How did they know?  "I'll know when I am ready to move forward", I would yell at them, but no words came out my mouth, only tears from my eyes. "This is my life and I will choose how I live it.  Actually I am fully in control of what I do with my life and it has nothing to do with your opinion," went my internal rant. People that cared about me, would try and taunt me forward by bringing my husband into it, "Robin would want you to move forward, he would want you to be happy." Statements like this would make me cringe! These are words you will never hear another widow say or anyone who has lost a significant person in their life.  Other people that have lost understand that these statements of encouragement are like stabs to the heart.  Nothing anyone else said could help me move forward.  

If you are reading this in hopes that you will get the answer to helping someone in your life move forward after loss, the only advice I can give you is to listen and nod and give the occasional hug when needed.  Remember your opinion is pointless.  If you get tired of supporting the person you care about through the grief then you will have to walk away and leave them to grieve on their own.  There is nothing that someone else can say to ease the pain, I had to learn how  to move forward on my own.  Please don't get me wrong the support was fantastic and I couldn't have gotten through the grief without the amazing people that surrounded me as only a few used these words and I put them at a distance!   The need some people felt to push me into my future, cemented me more in my past.

Everyone has their own internal guidance system, directing and leading them and mine started to whisper to me and pull me forward in the perfect timing for me.  These are the 10 things I was experiencing when I knew I was ready to start taking steps into the direction of my future.

1) I got to a place where I could get through the day without breaking down.  I was functioning and I wasn’t being triggered by each and every interaction I had or memory that crept into my brain.  The fog of grief was starting to lift leaving me in a different place, one that felt more like a perpetually cloudy day with occasional showers.  When my husband died, followed by other loved ones I was stuck in the fog of grief. Now when people are in the fog I tell them to embrace this time as it is so full of love. The extreme sadness was a result of the deep love, love was everywhere, it was almost magical. When the fog began to lift it was very contrasting as it left me in a cloud and this cloud was filled with fear.  

2) I had a fear that if I moved forward I would be moving away from the people that I lost.  I felt that if I moved into my future they would be left in my past.


3) I thought others would judge me thinking that if I moved forward it would prove to them that I didn’t truly love.  But it wasn’t just other people that were judging me, it was me judging me.  I had done it myself to other people when they got into new relationships right away.  I would say to myself, “how much did they really love them if they can move on so quickly?”  I told my husband if I ever died that he had to mourn me for at least 5 years.  It sounds so romantic, but romance can be very depressing.


4) The memories of my life with my husband and other loved ones that passed away anchored me.   The past was an anchor because it made me feel safe.  In my past everything was predictable and now all of a sudden my life was uncertain.  An anchor keeps you safe, it holds you in a place of security, but the anchor I was holding onto was imaginary, it was no longer tangible as he and the others were gone. 


5) I started to feel angry, really angry at everyone who left me, then I would feel guilty for getting angry, I didn't want my anger to diminished the love.  Then the guilt would pull me back to sadness and depression.  How could I get angry at them?  They were dead, they couldn’t fight back.  It is impossible to vent about the dead, it seems so callous.  When someone dies all of a sudden they become perfect.  No one is expected to be perfect when they are alive but when they are dead no one wants to hear anything bad about them.


6) There was a fear that if I  moved forward and created a new life, the reason they walked on this earth would be forgotten and it would be my fault.   I was scared if I moved forward, I would forget about them along with everyone else. Moving forward meant creating new memories and telling new stories that didn’t include them and the only thing that kept them alive was the memories and I couldn’t let them be forgotten by covering them up with a new life.


7) My future felt invisible.  I had a vision for what my future would look and when my husband passed away the future that I had envisioned for us disappeared and I felt I had no future.  I was walking around futureless.  Great spiritual teachers say that living in the now with no thought for the future is mindfulness but it felt absolutely horrible like a deep dark hole!  I hated it.


8) With no future I had no hope.  I felt like there was no point in trying to create a new life because I had lost all hope.  Lack of hope brought me to a very dark place, my future felt hopeless plus my whole life felt pointless.


9) I was worried that if I moved forward before other bereaved that were still deep in the grieving process, I would impede their healing. It would be my fault if they never fully healed.  It sounds strange but I thought we all needed to come out of the grieving process together at the same time, like it was a race and we all had to cross the finish line arm in arm then fall into each others arms in triumph for coming through this torturous struggle together.


10) I started to wonder what my future would look like.  I started to get curious and wonder where my life was going from here. This made me I realize,  on my own without the push of people who cared about me, that it was time to move forward and that I needed to figure out where my life was going.

The only hope I was given for a recovery was that this pain is going to be with me for the rest of my life and I would learn to live with it.  This felt completely unreasonable and I hated the thought of living the rest of my life with an undercurrent of pain but if this is my only option, I will do it.  The route I decided to assist me in moving forward was an 800 km pilgrimage in Spain, called the Camino.

The journey I took resulted in me writing a book I named "Walking Away From A Life I Love" and through this process I have learned to walk away from a place that I loved and into a new place that I love.  I observed myself and wrote through the whole process.  I found it interesting to observe death and grief from a different angle as I had worked in palliative care for many years and saw it inflicted on other people but now I could feel the effects on my own life.

I'm not going to lie, I hated it!  Grieving was so hard but I felt a need within me to find my way out without feeling this undercurrent of pain for the rest of my life.  I believe if I am going to live I need to live fully and happily.  And now I have done it!  I am on the other side of the pain and am back to loving my life.  Oh don't get me wrong, there are things in my life that get me sad or depressed or down right angry but they are things that are currently happening in my life.  My past isn't making me feel anything other than a deep appreciation for what I have gone through.

As a result I would love to share this experience with other people and support them as they start to feel that urge to move forward.  I am doing life coaching and one on one sessions but also I have designed an on-line program where I guide you through my book Walking Away From A Life I Love and give you time to go through the same process I went through.  In the end you will have your own book of stories of your loved one to share, pass on or keep just for yourself.

If you would like to join me on this journey I am starting an on-line  Distance Walking Program where we will be walking this journey from a distance together for 12 weeks.  This program will show you how to shed the pain of the past and replace it with love.  All you will need to do is get yourself some walking shoes and carve out an hour a day to make room to walk into your future.

To learn more about Charlene Wolff go to her website at charlenewolff.com

To book on line go to https://charlenewolff.com/schedule-appointment/