Dealing with grief

Right now, it seems that grief is like... there's this big hole in your life now, and you alternate between being afraid to even look in the hole; for fear of the memories & the loss that live there... and trying to do little things that start to make the hole healthy again.

I can just picture myself standing next to a big hole in the ground with a shovel. I'm too afraid to turn around and look at the hole... but every now and then I throw a shovelful of dirt toward it.

I don't think that it will ever be anything but a hole... but I guess that my greatest hope is to make it something that's part of me & healthy again. Some of the things that I try to throw at it are conversations with my son about his grandpa, or paying a couple dollars more for dinner if those dollars are donated toward cancer research. For me, small (positive) things that truly seem to ease the pain are the ones that go toward healing the hole.

Of course, I also wonder if my experiences with grief are limited to formerly Christian, Buddhism-leaning, humanistic agnostics; and if everyone else has a much easier time of it. After I saw the falling star on (the minute of) the anniversary of dad's passing it made me feel like... yeah... you know, the world might really be a bigger place than just this physical plane. Not that I don't generally feel that way (there has to be more than this), but unfortunately I've got a weakness for evidence and admit that sometimes faith just isn't always enough for me.