So, our business meeting this morning was crisp after an overnight frost, but bright and sunny with the birds singing their hearts out.
Diggers was like one of those pigs they use in Italy to hunt out truffles, nose down focussed and rooting through everything! Only Diggers was probably looking more for a discarded sandwich thrown from a car window than a truffle!
‘It’s been another difficult week for our Queen again this week’, Diggers announced whilst catching a glimpse of himself in the huge puddle of field water run-off. I wasn’t sure if he was talking to me or his reflection.
‘Yes’, I said ‘It certainly has been a very sad few days for the Queen and her family’.
Diggers ran up the bank in the green lane to a point I ironically call the ‘King of the castle’ spot - where you can look out across the fields and beyond. A great place for quiet contemplation. He stood there, sniffing the air. ‘I just don’t know how she does it! She’ll be 95 this month, she’s had a nation in crisis, a family in crisis and now a personal crisis!
‘Well, it’s like this Diggers’, I said looking out across the field with him. ‘Grief is something that is different for everyone. It can manifest in many different ways and continue through many different stages, taking an indefinable length of time for us to go through. It is a process of internal thoughts and experiences that will resurface and can be upsetting or can be endearing and humorous. Often, over time, the latter are the ones that tend to resurface more as we reach an acceptance and remembrance.
Strength though is something we all have inside us, even if we think we don’t, we just have to look for it sometimes and draw on it when we need it. To show strength is not to be cold or unfeeling or indeed does it replace pain and sadness that we feel in loss. It doesn’t negate the need for support or love from others. It is a coping mechanism that we can draw on to help drive us through. Strength can simply just give someone the ability to face the day-to-day routine whilst grappling to deal with grief in their own way.’
I recalled to Diggers a quote by one of my favourite writers and one that I have quoted from before. A man who had more than his fair share of grief - C.S Lewis
It’s not the load that weighs you down, It’s the way you carry it’. C S Lewis
I looked round but Diggers was chomping at something in the ditch….. He had found his ‘truffle’. The meeting was over!
