​OUR WORLD IS GRIEVING by Pennie Hunt

I am known as the happiness lady. My mission in life is three words: To Help Others. I teach you how to love your life- No Matter What! I share tips and techniques to bring love, gratitude, joy and happiness into your life in an effort to uplift and support you.

But, my friends, as I write this my heart is hurting. We have spent years watching the death count rise from a pandemic.  Fires and tornados rage through our country, destroying entire communities. The nightly news shows us the faces of fear as the reality of war is brought into our living rooms. Our friends and family members leave for church, school or grocery shopping and never return. Support for mental illness and the opioid crisis is not keeping up with the emotional devastation and loss of life it causes. The economy and stock market are sinking pulling with it savings, dreams and security. Civility, kindness, empathy and compassion have become words with weakened meaning.

Our world is grieving.
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I know something about grief.
 
I have written obituaries, planned funerals, fallen to my knees from the phone calls of death and laid battered, bruised, and broken in a puddle of helpless hopelessness.
 
I have said goodbye to friends and wiped tears from the eyes of their families.
 
I have held my Dad’s hand as he left this life and presented my Mom’s eulogy.
 
I have left the hospital carrying an empty blanket that should have held my baby and stood over an oak box that held my 22-year-old son. Both times, I sobbed with the pain no mother should feel.
 
I have walked the road of divorce, lost jobs, and said goodbye to pets that marked my heart as deeply as family.
 
I know what hurts the heart, what cracks it open. I know how that hurt allows pain, disappointment, regret, fear, anger, guilt, and all the emotions associated with loss and grief to creep in.
I can recite for you the stages of grief that the experts teach- denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I have zigzagged through all of them.
 
Grief is not a journey we choose, but it is a journey few of us escape. Once touched by grief we realize there is no cure or magic potion that allows us to ‘get over’ it. We learn to walk a picket fence with grief waiting for us to fall off into our fragile brokenness.
Our world is grieving.
 
Our world is bouncing through the stages of denial, anger, depression and back again. We try to understand. We ask the unanswerable questions.
 
Yes, I am known as the happiness lady. I live in a space of optimism and hope, however, I am not so naïve that I believe that all of this can be fixed with positive thinking.  But, I do have hope for our world’s grieving heart.
 
I hope the world never reaches the stage of acceptance where the current emotional and physical traumas become the acceptable norm. We should never forget or ‘get over’ this grief, but we will learn to carry it. 
 
I hope that we all walk this path of grief and loss mindfully and with love and gratitude.
 
I hope that our journey through this grief and loss will be gentle to each of our hearts and souls.
 
I hope the healing will begin.
 
I hope a day comes when we say that time has truly helped to heal our world’s broken heart- well, at least mend it back together.
 
Our world is grieving.
Friends, we are all grieving.
 
I hope that kindness, compassion and empathy become our strongest emotions.
 
I hope that as you move forward in this grief that you have the strength to reach out to help others with theirs.
And I hope that we once again learn to love our lives- No Matter What!
 
Pennie’s Life Lesson: Our world is grieving. It is time to heal together. 

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YOUR TURN...        
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