The Five Things I Have Learned Since Becoming a Widow – The Second Thing
The Importance of Positive Self Talk
In the early days of grief after my husband died, I struggled just to breathe and survive each hour, then each day. I did only what was absolutely necessary and left a lot of the rest. My house was a testament to this as the carpets were not vacuumed and after the meals that friends had brought to us were all eaten, the refrigerator and cupboards were bare.
I did little to support myself through my grief other than living in the moment. This is common in early grief, and as time moves on and the world continues to function without your person, I’ve noticed that those left behind seem to have two basic choices. One choice is to curl up in bed forever and wait for their own final day – which some people have chosen to do, or to start finding ways to manage life without your person. If you are one who has decided to get up and make that pot of coffee while trying to find a way to keep living some kind of life that is now completely different from anything you had planned or expected, it will be important to find the type of grief support that works best for you.
These are five things that I learned after my first year of becoming a widow. In each episode of this series of grief support posts, I will share one of the five things with you. I’ll be honest, these tools aren’t exclusive to widows or widowers, they are tools that are used by all people to cope with daily life and also to help live through through trauma and negative events. This week we will focus on the second tool that became my biggest lifesaver. It was a phrase that I kept saying to myself…. “You CAN do this!”
(If you are not interested in reading about how I wailed and sobbed on a riding lawn mower, and you only want to learn about this specific tool, Jump down to the section called How You CAN! The Importance Of Positive Self Talk.
Leaves
Before my husband died, we lost six family members over the course of 19 months. Losing my husband was the final blow. You can read about my 26 months of almost constant loss and trauma HERE. My father had died when I was a young girl and my mother never remarried. John’s mother had died several years earlier. Before this period of loss hit our family, we each had only one living parent. My father-in-law was the third of our six losses, he died nine months after we lost my mother and an aunt. Both of us were now left without any living parents.
A Little Bit About My Father-in-Law
My father-in-law was a quiet man when I first met him. A classic 1970’s dad, he kept to himself, coming home from work for a cup of coffee and cake at the kitchen table before going down to his workshop while my mother-in-law prepared supper. After supper he would either sit alone in the living room while the rest of us chatted at the kitchen table, or he would return to his shop. He rarely joined conversations, but when he did he would say the most hilarious things in six words or less, so you had to listen carefully!
Over the years he changed quite a bit and began staying at the table with us after meals to chat. After his wife died, he needed this even more (something I now understand even better about him). He loved to come and spend time at our home in the Northwoods. He loved being in the forest, surrounded by trees and the almost constant smell of pine (my house is surrounded by state and national forests).
He would stay with us for lengthy visits, sometimes up to six weeks at a time. We would go get him, bringing his walker, his oxygen machine, extra oxygen bottles, his cane, his equipment filling up the entire truck bed. Packing him up for a visit was similar to packing up a toddler with all of the things that must be brought along. I loved cooking his favorite German meals for him and then listening to him tell stories of his childhood in Germany after we finished eating. We took him to see waterfalls, lakes, and if we could time it right, he would come for the fall color tours when the leaves of the forests exploded with the bright autumn colors.
Being someone who knew how to fix everything, he would watch us do jobs around the house and offer his advice. This wasn’t always pleasant, especially for my husband who felt shamed by his father’s lectures on how to stain a deck, or how to fix a door, or how to rake leaves in the fall. Raking leaves at our house, even with a leaf blower, is a forty hour job. The fallen leaves become a thick blanket of almost a foot across the entire property. Once the leaves start falling, removal has to be started right away or the leaf pile becomes too thick and heavy, and it won’t move easily.
After My Father-in-Law Died
After my father-in-law died, my husband decided to buy a riding lawn mower with a bagging unit to collect the grass as well as to vacuum up the ridiculous amount of leaves each fall. He used money left from his father to make the purchase and we all thought this was the perfect way to spend this money. . His father would have loved the idea. John loved his John Deere rider, but only got to use the mower one season before he, too, got sick and then suddenly died.
John died on October 5th, and the leaves began falling from the trees that week. I watched those leaves and thought that the trees were crying along with me. I watched those tears fall like rain and realized that I would now have to do the job by myself. Forty hours of leaf blowing, alone. Or, I would have to try to figure out how to use the riding lawn mower – something that John hadn’t shared with me because it was HIS toy, HIS pride and joy, and there was no need for me to worry about running it. He would always do it. Except that now he wouldn’t. I’ve written about the day that John died, if you are interested in that story.
I decided to learn how to use the riding lawn mower, as this cut the leaf removal time down to about eight hours instead of forty.
My Second Tool: Positive Self Talk
Removing Leaves While Sobbing and Wailing
Two weeks after he died, I sat on the riding lawn mower in the garage and had my first “leaf removal” cry. I didn’t know how to start the thing. I thought to myself, “You CAN do this.” Over and over I said this as I tried different ways to get the darn mower going. And all of my attempts failed. So of course I did what any frustrated, lonely, angry widow would do. I wailed. Without any control, I bent over that riding lawn mower, my head resting on the steering wheel, and I wailed. I let myself wail until my body said it was finished and then I went back into the house and found the definitive source to all questions.. YouTube.
After a few minutes of searching I found a video that showed me how to start the mower. I had omitted one stupid step in my own trials. Feeling more confident, and again telling myself, “You CAN do this!” I returned to the garage. The mower quickly hummed to life and I backed it out of the garage.
This may seem like the end of the story, but it wasn’t. I may have thought that I had succeeded and that now all that remained was the job of driving around the yard multiple times to vacuum up the tears from the trees, but it wasn’t. As I drove around, the vacuum feature didn’t work. The leaves remained on the ground behind me after I had driven over them. More tears on the steering wheel and more YouTube videos helped me to set up the tube appropriately so that the vacuum feature worked once again. Done, right?
Wrong. Then the tube became clogged because the leaves were damp and they easily stuck together. The only way to remove the clog was to disassemble the tubing, push out the clog, reassemble the tubing and drive over the clump again with hopes that this time it would work. After removing what seemed like the 800th clog, I was once again reduced to wailing on the steering wheel. And then I remembered something. I remembered hearing John do this job the year before and hearing him yell every once in awhile in frustration. I remembered looking out the window to see what was wrong, only to find him disassembling the tubing for some reason. Well, now I knew the reason and between the tears of my own grief and frustration I smiled. I was in the same situation that he was in. And I told myself, “You CAN do this!”
Eventually, I learned an easier way of unclogging the tubes of the riding lawn mower, and I giggled as I remembered John learning and doing the exact same thing. The teardrop leaves from the trees were gone, my lawn was ready for winter, and I had learned a valuable lesson that helped me to get through this event: Positive Self Talk.
How You CAN! – The Importance of Positive Self-Talk
“When negative events or mistakes happen, positive self–talk seeks to bring the positive out of the negative to help you do better, go further, or just keep moving forward. The practice of positive self–talk is often the process that allows you to discover the obscured optimism, hope, and joy in any given situation.”
While trying to think positive isn’t always positive, especially in the heat of a situation, it IS something that can help you get through difficult times. As I was dealing with all of the different life situations that were thrown at me during those 26 months, friends in person and in social media often told me that I seemed to find the silver lining in everything. Well, for some things there is no silver lining, but in order to move forward it became important for me to find some small positives even though the big picture of my life was not following the plan that John and I had made for it
An exercise from Psychology Today describes the importance of acknowledging those negative thoughts and replacing them with positive self-talk. This article states:
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Write down some of the negative messages inside your mind that undermine your ability to overcome your depression. Be specific, whenever possible and include anyone you remember who contributed to that message.
Now, take a moment to intentionally counteract those negative messages with positive truths in your life. Don’t give up if you don’t find them quickly. For every negative message there is a positive truth that will override the weight of despair. These truths always exist; keep looking until you find them.
Another article from Healthline gives more tips. It says:
Forming a new habit takes time and effort. Over time, your thoughts can shift. Positive self-talk can become your norm. These tips can help:
- Identify negative self-talk traps. Certain scenarios may increase your self-doubt and lead to more negative self-talk. Work events, for example, may be particularly hard. Pinpointing when you experience the most negative self-talk can help you anticipate and prepare.
- Check in with your feelings. Stop during events or bad days and evaluate your self-talk. Is it becoming negative? How can you turn it around?
- Find the humor. Laughter can help relieve stress and tension. When you need a boost for positive self-talk, find ways to laugh, such as watching funny animal videos or a comedian.
- Surround yourself with positive people. Whether or not you notice it, you can absorb the outlook and emotions of people around you. This includes negative and positive, so choose positive people when you can.
- Give yourself positive affirmations. Sometimes, seeing positive words or inspiring images can be enough to redirect your thoughts. Post small reminders in your office, in your home, and anywhere you spend a significant amount of time.
Becoming Aware of Your Negative Thought Patterns
- Realize whether you’re clinging to negatives.
- Keep a gratitude journal.
- Remember that it’s not always your fault.
- Avoid catastrophizing.
- Believe in positive outcomes.
- Keep in mind that not everything is simply black or white.
Journaling Positive Self-Talk
If you read my first post in this series, I described how I not only organized my life by using a bullet journal, but I also used it as a tool to collect inspirational quotes which I could read at any time during the day when I felt I needed a boost. A bullet journal can also be a great place to record positive affirmations, identify negavite self-talk traps, record daily gratitudes,
5 Things I Learned Since Becoming A Widow Series
- Organize, Organize, Organize
- Positive Self Talk
- Be Gentle With Yourself
- Facing “The Monsters”
- Distract Yourself
I’ll be sharing another personal example of how I told myself, “You CAN do this,” to get through a major event. With that post I will also share the benefits of positive self-talk.
If you, or someone you care about is dealing with grief, here are some tips for coping with grief from people who are dealing with it themselves!
Our ClassCee Life provides general educational information from someone who has experienced great loss. You should not substitute information on the Our ClassCee Life website for professional advice.
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