On the way to the bus, we had this cool tree-lined street with these massive oak trees. The roots elevated this sidewalk, and I would run from tree to tree, trying to climb them, and then let my grandma know that there were alligators down below. She would tell me when the coast was clear so I could jump from one tree to the next.
She always congratulated me when I got to that next tree. She took the time, and she didn’t rush me. She didn’t care when the bus was coming and going. When I was with her, I felt like I was the only person in her life—that was my grandma Gerri.
I was slightly confused when I got older because my grandma Gerri talked about my grandpa Frank as if he walked on water and could do no wrong. She had been divorced from him for decades at this point. This was back when you couldn’t talk about divorce. It was something to hide. It was a taboo thing. My grandpa, Frank, had been unfaithful to my grandma Gerri. He’d had an affair at work with his coworker.
They got divorced, and the confusing thing was the way that she enshrined my grandfather when I knew he had messed up. I didn’t understand it at the time, but as I got older and older, I learned about unresolved grief and unresolved emotional pain, the things we do to put on armor to try and protect our hearts from ever letting that happen to us again, that hurt or that loss. The sad thing is, my grandma Gerri never dated again. I never heard of her opening her heart to another person again – another man again.
It breaks my heart that that was her experience. Unresolved grief and unresolved emotional pain from the past robs us of choice. It robs us of living the quality of life that we once lived.
I know this was true for my grandma. It hurts me. I wish she could have worked through the pain, hurt, and unfinished feelings to have found love again. Unfortunately, the way she hoped things would play out with my grandfather never did, and she never opened her heart again.
I wish I could have helped her more when she was alive.
Can you imagine being so hurt that you can’t ever open your heart again for the rest of your life because of a loss that’s affected you like that? If that’s you or someone you know, we can help you. We’ve done this work on our pain, on our hurt, on our loss, on our trauma. We’ve taken some actions so that we can say goodbye to that unfinished emotional business, to those things that feel so incomplete that we can’t even look at them. We’re terrified to look at them.We’ll show you in a safe place how to look at that stuff and say goodbye to it so you can move forward, open your heart once again, and experience life as deeply and as profoundly as you want. It’s only fair that we do that.
