260830 What I learned in my studies this morning 6

Today's Meditation:

Enchiridion, 8

Do not try to make what happens happen as you wish, but wish for what happens in the way that it happens and then the current of your life will flow easily.

I read, made special note of it, this just before a post online made me think of my dead son.

Even now it is still hard to do.

I know I can't change the past*. Wishing it were different is not only foolish but harmful to my psyche. It cannot change. Let it be.

Live the life I have left. Live with the family I have. Embrace it for the alternative is lasting disability and slaving myself for no reason.

Some may say "You must not have truly loved him" or some such waddle because "look at X or Y or Z. Don't you see how miserable they are? How devastated? How out of their mind they are with grief? It's been years and they've never recovered. They're still in the depths, subsumed by their grief."

Of what use is that? In what way does it make me a better person to forego giving myself to my remaining children and my spouse to perform a permanent penance for my child?

They deserve better even if I don't know that I do.

Perhaps my punishment will come after I die. I don't know.

But castigating myself beyond the bounds of reason is not the answer.

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* Prayer is asking that a divine power alter the laws of reality just here, just now, for just you.

Not that I haven't done that. And not that I didn't submerge myself in my grief in the time soon after his death. But all things must end. Excessive grief included.