Grief turns your world upside down by turning good memories into painful memories. Then in order to avoid the painful memories you start avoiding anything and anyplace that stirs the pain. The result is that grief starts to shrink your world until you exist in just a small sliver of space and time. The only way to get your world back and restore the painful memories to their rightful place as good memories is to walk through the pain back into life. Before Sherrie died she made me promise to revisit Mount Vernon, Williamsburg, and Virginia Beach. Sherrie knew the only way for me to live again was to walk through the pain back into life. This past weekend I made the visit to Mount Vernon. Last year my wife was alive sitting on the above pictured chair overlooking the Potomac River. This year the chair is empty and it hurts. I walked all over Mount Vernon reliving our last visit there together remembering some funny events, straining hard to see her in my mind in places where she stood, and feeling the emptiness of not having her by my side. At the end of the day I had reclaimed a small piece of my world. It will take more visits to Mount Vernon as well as Williamsburg and Virginia Beach, but with each visit and each tear shed, the pain will lessen, the good memories will return, and my world will expand.
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