Living with ongoing grief

Hi all, Been thinking of posting about this for awhile. I have been living with unresolved grief for a long time now, and as time passes and the shock and the tragedy recede further into the past, I keep expecting to move on, to become someone I recognize, and can enjoy being. I have been trying, believe me. I have some observations I would like to share, and I welcome any other insights or shared experiences. There is something shameful about grief that doesn't heal, like you are somehow flawed because you can't get over it, and slowly people you could formerly count on, drift away, as though you have something catching. At the least, you are a downer.

When the shocking news of the terrible thing first happened, I felt my body was dying from the pain. Surely a human heart could not keep beating through such agony. And I wanted it to stop beating. I remember falling on the floor, wailing from my depths sounds that I could not grasp were coming out of me. The Bible speaks of the travailing of women...I was in it. Of it's own volition, my head was hitting on the floor, again and again, and yet I was out of my body, watching. My frightened my loved ones instantly started trying to get me to "get hold" of myself. But the myself I used to hold on to had vanished in a heartbeat, and so far, has not been back again. And there began for me a protracted journey through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, a completeness of darkness I never dreamed existed, an utter absence of light.

What does so much harm to those of  us who must walk this journey is the cultural baggage of myths about grieving. Like the movies where the mother gets the news of  her child's death, and sniffles into her husband's lapels. And we wonder, what is wrong with me? Why did I have such a catastrophic reaction? And then all the conventional wisdom of the stages of grief, which sort of touches on this, but gives you the two year time period of healing. And what happens when your two year sentence is up, and you still carry that stone in your heart? What do you do when you still watch joy passing you by, and life goes on without you?

I don't have an answer yet to finding joy again, or what it takes to fully heal. I had believed it was time, and I still hope that more time will help. I think there are many others like me, who after years of unresolved grief, fear there is something wrong with them, that they are now broken, and who have watched themselves become someone else, and are trying to learn to live with this new self, this self that lives in sorrow. I want to move on from this loss, badly. I want to wake up without the tidal wave of changes I never wanted washing over me. And I will post later about what I have done to keep choosing life. But it is vital I believe for those who carry such a grief to be able to find compassion somewhere, instead of impatience, and watching yet one more person give up on you, and learning to be silent, and pretend. It becomes the most solitary of paths.