"I never thought of it that way before"

I have a million and one other things that I should probably be doing right now, but I thought about this earlier today and it keeps popping in my head. So apparently I'm meant to relay this message to someone. Whether it rings true to you now, or it's something you remember, and helps you get through a hard time in the future. It's a lesson I have never forgotton.

Suprise, Suprise, it has something to do with the Oprah show :) A woman came on the show, her daughter had been brutally murdered years before and it was her wish to come on Oprah's show and speak to the audience and the world, to gain some sort of closure for her and her daughter. She had left everything in her daughter's room, the way it was before she had died. "My goal for the yeard 2000, is to tell my daughter's story on your show, and then let that go, and get on with my life...."

Her Mom mourned the loss of her daughter every day for 10 years, "For me, Lori died just as easily today as she died ten years ago..." As time passed, she felt like the loss of her daughter was a hole that got deeper and deeper.

JoAnne, the mother, wrote to the show with the hopes of getting help to end her obsession with the death of her daughter. She was stuck in grief and wanted to move on.

Oprah asked her, "What is it that you want to say?"

"That LoriAnn was a person, she did not deserve to be thrown away like a bag of trash, they threw her away in the river like a bag of trash. I just want to go to the highest mountain and scream and let people know the pain that will never go away because of this."

And Dr. Phil asked "Do you want it to go away? I mean, do you really want it to go away??"

She responded quietly through tears, "Yes, I do."

And he came back firmly, "I'm asking you now, can you at least entertain the fact, that how long you grieve, is not a reflection of how deeply you loved your daughter?"

"I believe I do."

"Can you accept, if you get closure on this, if you say, "I'm not going to be obsessed with this anymore", you are not betraying your daughter?"

"Yes I think I can."

"If she could talk to you right now, do you think she would say, "Mother, I want you to hurt every day for the rest of your life to prove that you loved me."

"Oh gosh no, she would be very angry at me over this."

"So it wouldn't be a betrayal. Maybe the betrayal is focusing on the day of her death, rather than celebrating the event of her life. She lived for 18 vibrant, wonderful years. And you focus on the day that she died."

"I never thought of it that way, I really never thought of it that way."

After that conversation was finished and they were ending the interview, the Mother said, through tears and what appeared to be a glow of newness and relief: "I thought after I had made this goal, that I could go home, I'm sorry, I was going to go home and take my life."

"But now you've changed your mind." -Oprah

"Oh yes, oh yes, I've changed my mind."

This story has always stuck with me, whether for the simple sense that I just love the story and it touches my heart, but also for the underlying message, that a lot of the way that things affect us in life, is the way we think about them. The meaning we give to a circumstance or a situation. She was holding onto the grief because she thought by doing that, she was honoring her daughter who was brutally murdered. But truly, once she changed her perspective, and realized that how she was choosing to behave, was exactly what her daughter would NOT have wanted, it changed her life. And she found a reason to live.

♥