How are my recovery tools helping me to live with grief and loss?

How am I feeling my feelings today?

Welcome to episode 351 of the Recovery Show.

This is Spencer and this is not going to be a normal episode of the show. It's more of a

maybe audio journal entry. I'm currently standing in a field outside my parents' house

where a few days ago my father died. I'm looking at snow-covered field with

dead grasses and other plants sticking up through apparently dead.

But I know that underneath the snow the plants still live. There are seeds that will sprout in

the spring and in fact right now are giving life to a flock of wild turkeys.

So it is with my father's life he planted seeds in many other people's lives

to continue to grow and flower and flourish. And while his body, his physical being is gone he

continues to live on in all of us in which he planted those seeds.

I was driving here last week the day after he died. I had heard from my brother that my father

had stopped eating and thought I should immediately jump in the car and drive and

realized that there were some things that I really should do before I left home

like make sure that I was COVID negative, clear up some stuff at work and he started eating a

little bit so it didn't seem quite so urgent. The night before I was planning to leave I got the

call from my brother that he had passed and there was a little bit of self-kicking there like well

why didn't I go a day earlier but what I've come to understand after being here for a few days is that

having an hour or so which is what it would have been with an unconscious father is much less

important than being here with the people he left, the people whose lives he touched

sharing that with them, sharing our grief together. You know that's a gift of acceptance,

...