A Fly In The Ointment

Last night I decided to get out my little table top grill that Ben and I always hid in our earthquake kit and cook a couple of small steaks on it for Hiker's and my dinner. Now I remember why I got rid of the full sized BBQ Ben used to cook on. It's too much trouble to clean after cooking. I'll just stick with my George Foreman Grill. Had my grief support group today at the Senior Center. It was a very good session. A new lady joined us. Her husband of 59 years passed away 3 months ago. She was crying a lot and kept apologizing for it. I told her to never apologize because she deserves to cry and that the tears are helping her release the grief from her heart. I felt bad for her because I remember when I first joined the group that I cried a lot at first and it does embarrass you until you realize that none of the people there are going to judge you because they all totally understand. It was a good session until a new man joined the group half-way through the session. He was very obnoxious and would not stop talking. It was like he wanted to be the center of everyone's attention. He lost his spouse in February, but the way he was acting, none of us saw any grief in him. He kept telling us how happy he was...that he was not sad. We all more or less came to the conclusion that he is in total denial and that he is forcing himself to be “happy” to avoid the grief. This is not a healthy thing to do. He even started to give “advise” to the new lady who joined us, telling her he didn't like to see her cry that he wanted her to be happy. Our therapist had to interrupt him several times to get him to stop trying to take control of the conversations. All of the regular members were getting very annoyed with him. Our therapist actually ended the session a little early because this guy was frustrating everyone. I went to lunch with a few of the ladies from group and we were all saying we just wanted to tell this guy to SHUT UP! We were all saying we feel sorry for him that he has lost his wife but we really hope he does not come back to our group. I'm afraid he will though because he more or less said he would return. The only good thing he did was make the new lady laugh because of his ranting and she told me and DeDee that she needed that. Lunch was nice. There were 5 of us and we can all sit and discuss our grief knowing that everyone there understands. When I got home, I took Hiker out for another short walk. The sun never did come out here today and it's been in the high 50's all day. Crazy weather we've been having. In the 90's for a couple of days and now this again.