The greatness of sharing grief and joy.

A rainy wednesday!
This morning we went to get the stitches out, called agraphs. 21 of them in a nice sort of heavymetalrow down the right side of my person. Not a very pleasant moment but now its done!
To take my mind of my own misery I have a few thoughts to share.

In Sweden, where I live, the focus last week was concentrated on the 30th
memorialday of Olof Palme. He was shot 30 years ago, this Prime minister.
We woke up that saturday morning shocked by the news, everyone in shock, not since the great honorable days of war had anyone of great importance been shot in Sweden. And all of a sudden we
shared some kind of public grief. He was quite a controversial type of politician, not everyone was sorry, but people came to the spot in hundreds, crying, leaving hundreds of roses. And it kept on.
I was there a year later, maybe two and there were still roses and candles, people standing quiet.
When someone official die, a celebrity, a royalty, superstar, politician, pope even, we react in this way.

My first contact with this was when the old king died, in 1973. Tv showed the walls around the castle and a small door. We sat there staring at that small door for, as it seemed, eternity. And so it opened.
Someone declared: His majesty king Gustav the 6th Adolf is dead. Then there was silence and then
saluting from the palaceyard.
And people all over cried, even if they had never met the King. People cried, as did I, when Elvis died in 1977, although I never met him. Palme I did meet, he occured to me as a nice man, ready to listen to us teenagers.

And so we have some kind of common sorrow, grieving that we share with people we have never seen or met. It creates a bond between us. Why do we act this way? Today, with the internets all options there are no limits. Are the gigantic proportions more okey if the one lost is very distant? Perhaps we need a certain amount of distance to the pain that death causes? Our personal losses sometimes seem to be delt with rather quickly so that life can go on, sometimes we can manage , sometimes not. We need to handle it gently, the sadness close to us.

The public grieving, shared with hundreds, thousands or even millions, like with that poor boy face down in the waterline, teaches us to get in touch with our innerlife. We read, watch, meet and pick up quotes and good lyrics . We learn to express our emotions. We are not alone.
In the long run, all grieving is a sign . It tells us that somebody meant something to us, made a difference, that it's not all the same to us with people we meet, love and get to know. Even celebritys can be meaningful in our lives, even if we never get close. We are sad because those persons made us happy in one way or other.
And so we sometimes should be crying for every person that is taken away from life to soon, to sudden, to gruesom. The lonely people, the unheard and unseen, the ones that never made any difference according to our way of thinking, their death is also a loss because there is no saying when someone
steps into our lives and shine for a moment. For some people that moment never occurred, that's a loss.

My focus should be turned from my battered hip to people. I need to learn to grieve and let it take time because it makes me more focused on those still alive around me, learning to see and appreciate them is an equally important task.
I still cry over Freddy Mercury, I still cry over my grandmother and grandfather beacuse I miss them, very differently but still. But there are many more left to be glad about, known and still unknown.
Painful is grieving, joyful is living. Both are meant to be shared.