~ DEATH AND MEMORIES ~
~ DEATH AND MEMORIES ~
Dear Friends on the Journey ~
My name is Mari and I am a compulsive eater. I'm grateful to be here ... to be in recovery ... and to know that I can share my journey to recovery with you.
A member of our recovery community has a father who will not live very much longer. He is seriously ill and the doctors aren't giving the family a great deal of hope. Having a loved one die is not an unusual event in our loving fellowship ~ but in this case it is particularly poignant. Long before her father became ill, we learned about him ... and came to know him through his daughter's beautiful words to us. The first sign of illness, we knew about it. He is beloved and we were blessed by witnessing this love between a daughter and her father as they lived their lives. And we will continue to be blessed in the days and weeks to come as she shares her innermost feelings and fears with us ... and her love for this precious parent who is leaving her.
Losing someone we love in whatever form it takes is one of the most profound experiences we ever have in our lifetime. To know that someone we have had in our hearts daily ... someone we've talked with day after day ... someone we've poured out our hearts to ... to know that one morning we will not hear a good morning from them or that the day will go by and we will not have our usual contact is excruciatingly painful.
Just as we did when we learned that we had a terrible disease called compulsive eating, when we learn someone we love may be leaving us, we enter a stage called denial. That escalates to the bargaining stage at some point and soon we know that isn't going to work. The acceptance stage begins slowly ... we have fought the good fight and some inner voice tells us its time to surrender. We do and this is the stage our fellow loopie is in now.
The stage of grief hits us at various times ... some sooner ... some later. And then healing begins.
And we're left with memories ... so many memories ....
