Allowing Grief

Within the first week or 2 after my wife passed away, we had a close friend who called me and you know paid her condolences and she told me, she said, Gabriel you have to allow yourself to grieve. I was like, what do you mean by that? I mean I wasn’t planning on not but I mean what are you talking about?

She said, when I lost my mother, I had a friend who said, have you allowed yourself to grieve? And this lady, she’s a tough Hispanic woman, this lady who I was on the phone with, a really tough Hispanic woman. She kind of had to hold her own. A lot of people let her down in life.

And she’s like, yeah, I cried for 15 minutes at my mom’s funeral, so yeah, I grieved. And her friend’s like, no, no, no, you have to let yourself grieve. And she was counseled, if you don’t let yourself grieve, that energy, that negative energy is in you. You’re not making it disappear by not allowing yourself to do it, it’s in you and it will manifest itself in different ways.

It can manifest itself in depression, it can manifest itself in broken relationships and being unable to get close to people. It can manifest itself in physical disease.