Becoming a whole person

A single person admonished me, “Remember, Fred, as a single, you are still a whole person.” That was good advice but not necessarily accurate math right after the loss of your spouse. It takes time to “grow back” the missing parts of your life. You have to adjust and decide what things you will do and what things you will let go. When I began to lose Jackie this summer as her condition worsened it was a horrible, painful tearing apart. The result was raw emotional wounds and missing practical functioning parts of my life. The two of us, like many couples, had truly become one. No wonder I have felt like and functioned like roughly “a half a person”.

I can see now that I am becoming a whole person but still there is a huge emotional and functional gap in my daily life. God is helping me to heal and rebuild but still it takes time for a grieving spouse to heal from the emotional wounds and be a functioning whole person. By ‘leaning into my grief’ and asking God’s help and doing the hard things, I am healing.