My song today is ‘Always on My Mind’ which one of our birthday celebrants specifically requested. This ballad was written by Wayne Carson, Johnny Christopher, and Mark James. The song has been a crossover hit, charting in both the country and western and pop categories. It has been covered by dozens of artists since it was first recorded, including Brenda Lee, Elvis Presley, and Willie Nelson most notably. Willie Nelson 1982 version won him a Grammy Award, and his version of this song is my favourite.
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To me, this song spells ‘love, love, love’. Who else is there that can bring out feelings of love in someone like a person we love, have loved but lost to death, and will always love. As I write this post for today’s daily song, I think about the loved ones and the soulmates who have died and left the lives of so many people over recent years bereft of their presence. The ‘love’ of a person is so powerful a thing that its presence can make one feel whole for the first time in their life or its absence can shatter and break one’s heart in two. No matter how we measure the effect on our lives, ‘love’ can either make or break us by its presence and its absence.
A part of me always feels that when a soulmate dies, and the loss of their presence has the dire effect of emotionally unsettling the bereaved partner for the remainder of their lives, that they expressed their love disproportionally when their soulmate lived. This assertion of mine is not to cast the slightest doubt that they loved their partner in life more than life itself, but that they did not have sufficient love of self to healthily sustain the loss of their loved one after he/she departed this life. Indeed, the very fact that they tell you that they ‘loved the deceased more than life itself’ is indicative of a disproportionate imbalance of their feelings. Such a declaration following the death of a loved one harbours difficulty in healthily coming to terms with their loss. It also indicates that the bereaved person’s self-talk has unknowingly instructed the body to ‘no longer feel alive’ when their loved one is dead.
The way out of prolonged grief paradoxically involves them doing the very opposite to what they did wrong while their partner lived. lt is also a way that their deceased loved one would heartedly approve of, were they able to advise them today. The love of their bereaved partner would undoubtedly lead them to tell them to worry less about their departure, and to concentrate more on the arrival of their new self.
This new self will be a person who begins to love themselves. They will be an individual who recognises that that self-love is healthy, the more love they have within them, the more love they have to express toward others. And,so it is true about all levels of personal attributes. The more self-respect one has, the more likely one will truly respect others, and that the less one lives in the past, the more they can live for the present, and plan for their future life.
The issue is not that they loved their partner too much when they lived, but that they did not love themselves enough. Whenever a disproportionate allocation of any individual’s love quotient pertains within any relationship, and the individual who is left bereaved never gave themselves sufficient love before their partner died, their bereavement period will be unnecessarily extended and will be far more emotionally difficult to negotiate.
So, accept that your deceased partner loved you as much as you did them, and know in your heart that were they able to communicate with you and influence your actions today, it would be in today’s language they would be speaking to you in, and it would be about today’s concerns and today’s circumstances that they would ask you to apply your mind to. No deceased person would ever desire that you mourned them forever and made your once happy home an eternal shrine or a morgue. They would naturally like you to remember the best parts about them and to forgive any small faults they had. ‘Not to be forgotten’ and ‘to be fondly remembered’ is what they would ask of you. Their most important wish, however, would be ‘take what happiness you can find’ in your future life.
Finally, you need never fear that you will forget them and what they meant to you when they were alive, as they live on in your heart and mind. All the things they stood for and believed in still matter and serve their memory. Your loving partner also lives on in the looks and mannerisms of their children, their grandchildren, and the children of your grandchildren not yet born. Life goes on and on, and when it's gone, it lives in someone new.
Love and peace
Bill xxx