The effect of cumulative grief

We all have photos of old rellies like this one.  My grandmother 2nd from the left, and her 3 sisters that she was very close to all her life.  I can say all her life, as she outlived every one of them, and 4 brothers and one baby, and her parents.

Parents are part of the natural order, but you don't think of losing your brothers and sisters until you are very old, that is if you think about it at all.  At age 95, her last brother died and the final year of her life was very sad, she had outlasted them all in a race she didn't want to win.  She was an excellent athlete in her youth but this was a race that she didn't enter, and didn't think about until it was really too late.  Not that it would have changed anything, and with her  nature she would have voluntarily taken on the  mantle of grieving 7 siblings rather than have one of them do the same.

This year, 2016, has seen most of the world suffer what she did.  Cumulative grieving.  It's an odd term, but it simply means that when one thing goes wrong, or one person dies we can pick up and move on. It might take us a while, but we will do it.  When they pile up, the grief does too, but we don't feel it for a while.  There's so much busy stuff to do when someone dies, and so when we get ganged up on, the grieving for the new death, or the new crisis gets put on the back shelf with the grief of the first event or person because we're just too damned busy to deal with it.

This is why emergency services personnel often fall apart, and the question is sometimes asked "But why? After all this time? Everything was going so well"  - Exactly!  When everything is going so well, those multiple grieving episodes jump out from behind the sofa and yell "BOO!" in a big loud voice.  And even though we can see their shadow in the mirror, they still scare us when they do it.

The whole world is suffering from cumulative grief right now due to the enormous number of celebrities who have died this year.  Celebrities these days through social media are people we feel we know not just someone we watch in a movie.  They are in our lives, and our  minds and hearts, and their deaths do affect us.  The outpouring of grief and love that was seen at the start of the year is now tinged with the cynicism of "Oh another one" when the person who has just died would have received if they had gone first!

In numerology terms 2016 is a number 9 (2+0+1+6) which is the end of a cycle.  And 2017 is a 1 (2+0+1+7=10 and 1+0=1).  The end of an era in so many, many ways, but to make way for all the new and lovely shiny things 2017 has in store for us.

It's also a time to be kind, to be gentle, and to be loving, thoughtful and positive, because when the pressure goes off, there will be many who still have to emotionally catch up with what has happened in 2016.