Monday Morning Chat Over Coffee - Mourning

Yesterday evening I was ready to shut it all down and walk away. By everything I mean 360, Profiles, Twitter, Blogger and Facebook. Like my friend Sails I had reached sensory overload but not for the technical glitches and learning of new things and trying to keep up temporarily with one blog too many. I was just totally sated with the seemingly random rapid firing of diverse emotions I was getting in comments and status messages. Fortunately the cactus bud began to open and I was diverted with recording the process with my camera.

This morning as I encountered an even more open blossom to photograph I was also confronted with more emotions dripping off the blog pages. And it hit me suddenly. We are all in mourning. Our beloved Y!360 is dying and we really do not know how to cope.

We are going through the five stages of mourning and varying rates and without benefit of support group because here we are talking about technical processes and not Denial and Isolation, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance. I think a lot of us, including me, are pretending acceptance. Judith Viorst in Necessary Losses writes about how we go through mourning even when the loss is something we wanted as in a divorce or graduation from college. To move on and up and out we must release: We must say goodbye to something.

I am bombarded at the moment not only with my own rapid changing of emotions about 360 and the loss of friends, but with the emotions of all my friends. And then there is my ex-husband who is in mourning for his whole body as he goes back and forth between bargaining and anger about the future amputation of his foot and/or lower leg. And I am still going through my stages of grief over the loss of my dear friend, Kathi.

I think it is key to the whole "recovery period" to know that the five stages of mourning are not linear necessarily. It should rather be seen as a giant emotional pinball machine. And we don't always reach acceptance. Sometimes there is a huge TILT and we get stuck somewhere in the process. And we can pick a seemingly superficial issue like the closing of a blog platform to hide from ourselves and the world all the other more serious issues we are dealing with.

For many of us 360 has been our port in a storm. Our life raft during trying times in the "real world" and now we are asked to joyfully swim to an uncertain shore. Please be kind to each other as we go through this. And be kind to yourself.