Grief and Loss on Valentine’s Day
If this is the first valentine’s day after your husband or wife died, your depression can push you into a transformational experience. Use DBT skills to turn things around.
❤️Do something to help make someone else’s day nice.
Buy some of those valentine’s cards that children get for their class mates and mail them to your friends.
Make valentine’s hearts and give them to your neighbors or a lonesome person in a retirement home.
❤️Allow yourself to cry and then dance around the kitchen to take a brief vacation from your sorrow.
❤️Compare yourself to those who are most certainly suffering more than you are. I had a friend who used to run and he would pass a one legged man in a wheel chair. If my friend, was feeling depressed, all he had to do was see this smiling man to feel better.
❤️Stop hating your grief. Just observe it as you would a painting in a museum. Know that the part of you that grieves is not a bad part and the part that judges your grief, is not a bad part. You are in touch with the part of your brain that is enveloped in sorrow, and you have other parts that know how to feel joy.
❤️Make a list of all the things you have done well recently. Did you get our of bed today and brush your teeth? That alone can be a success when you are feeling miserable.
❤️If all you want to do is sleep all day long, do the opposite of that. Get up and go for a walk, or better yet, call the friend who offered to do anything for you and ask them to walk with you.
❤️Buy yourself some flowers and chocolate. Make yourself a valentine’s day card. Light a candle to bring in light, and remember, the days are getting longer and you have made it through the darkest days of winter. Soon it will be March.
Use Creativity
How are you creative? What is your creative outlet? Do you cook, journal, or work in the garden? I know it is the dead of winter, and that might be a good time to jump start your vegetable or flower garden.
Did you ever play a musical instrument? Get it out and play it again. Love the sounds your instrument makes. There are no wrong notes. Do you have young children who are also missing their parent? Get pots and pans and bang and sing together.
Think you are not creative? That is not true. Just decide you are creative and get a pencil and paper and draw like you are a ten or five year old. Sing in the shower, make up a song.
Write a letter to your loved one who has died. Think of all the ways you felt loved by them and all the reasons you loved them back. It’s okay if your tears splash all over the paper.
Know it is only a day
Probably the anticipation of the day coming is much worse than the day itself. Plan a ritual ahead of time to mark the event. If the ground is not frozen where you live, plant a tree. If the ground is frozen, make a heart shape with stones in your rock garden. Just keep asking yourself, “what am I going to do about it?” Or “How can I think of this differently?” Remember each day that passes, you are better than you were on the day your loved one died. Perhaps be grateful that you, not the one who is gone, is the one in grief. After all you would not wish this sadness on anyone else, especially the one you loved most.
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