There is no magic spell or pill to take it away!

Today, someone said to me 'get over him already. How long are you going to mourn for him and what was going on between you two anyway? You said he was a friend.' He was talking about a friend who passed away last month. Is it I or something is wrong with what he said to me? Grief is not something you just get over. You cannot wake up one day and say 'hmm, I think I have grieved long enough, I will stop grieving today.'

There is no specific time to get over grief. It is different for everyone. We cannot recover magically from it. It is not that simple and does not work that way. Grieving, like everything else in life is complicated.

I understand the reason why my friend is irritated, he is jealous. He was jealous of my relationship with my deceased friend while he was alive and now he feels he is competing with a dead person. And that freaks him out. He does not like the little things I am doing to honor and remember my friend. He feels that I am overdoing it but he does not seem to see how it is helping me to deal with my grief. He said I would never be over his death...WHAT? Why would I want to be? 

This was a dear friend who meant a lot to me. To be over him would be the opposite of what I truly felt for him. To me, I am over him meant that I am over loving him, but I don't think I would ever stop loving him. We don't stop loving people because they die. But that does not mean I want to be mired in grief the rest of my life. I would move on but I would not be over him.

 What I am trying to convey to my friend is this - in life, we don't get over our loved ones, we don't forget them, but we learn to live with the loss. We learn to focus on the present and the future despite the loss. Life would go on even in the middle of grief. Life moves forward and the intensity of the pain lessens with time. However, no matter what we want or wish for, our grief would not disappear overnight. There is no magic spell or pill to take it away. It is a process. 

I will leave you with this quote by Kahlil Gibran

 "  ...  Then it is better for you that you cover your nakedness and pass out of love's threshing-floor, Into the seasonless world where you shall laugh, but not all of your laughter, and weep, but not all of your tears.  Love gives naught but itself and takes naught but from itself.  Love possesses not nor would it be possessed; For love is sufficient unto love..."