Grief Insights
Everything That Was, No Longer Is
The one thing that we all share as humans, is grief. Death is universal; we are mortals after all - and so are the people we love. Grief can be an existential dilemma and there is no concealing our humanness and vulnerability when death appears. When death enters, it illuminates our limitations and the idea of us having control, all but disappears. The existential (the relating to existence) is churned up and the suffering begins. Many of us find out that we are not as prepared as we thought we would be to handle this new phenomenon called grief. It has a well defined starting point, but no visible finish line. With no road map to guide us, grief can work it’s way into every aspect of our lives.
Everything that we have ever held onto as normal, can suddenly fade into the distance. There are no rules to this, even though your friends, family and community may tell you differently. Messages like, ‘it’s time to move on’, ‘they wouldn’t want you to be so sad’ or the ever popular ‘they are in a better place’ are all constructed and delivered to you, the griever, as a way to assuage your pain. Your pain and utter anguish scares people, whether they want to admit it or not. Death scares us because we are life creatures. People feel helpless when they witness incredible suffering and feel these types of verbal offerings are helpful to you in someway. But, is there really anything anyone could say that would help or change the worst experience of our lives?
“The reality of grief is far different from what others see from the outside. There IS pain in this world that you can’t be cheered out of. You don’t need solutions. You don’t need to move on from your grief. You need someone to see your grief, to acknowledge it. You need someone to hold your hands while you stand there in blinking horror, staring at the hole that was your life.”
— Megan Devine, Author of “It’s OK You’re Not Ok”
In our early stages of grief, we are in a state of survival. We struggle to be open, as our limbic brain becomes fully engaged with limited access to our concrete thought, problem solving or connection. Grief can feel like a desert - just enough water and soil to keep us alive. Can we be graceful and gracious with ourselves during this time of sorrow, when the world feels unsafe and we feel like we no longer belong to the world we knew? We can’t go back to where we were and yet we don’t want to be anywhere else. We are stuck - in the between place - the place of the self before they died and the new self that will eventually become, because they died.
“Everyone can master a grief, except he who has one”
— William Shakespeare
The people I have had the honour of working with across Canada, are those who have struggled to find the ground they need in order to manage this desert of sorrow and homelessness of grief. There is no easy way to do this work and all of it is exactly as it should be. People often worry that they ‘shouldn’t’ feel this way or fear that they aren’t 'doing it right’. I help them make sense of that which has none.
Grief is considered a dark pit; the pit is bad, it’s negative and it has no value. We look for anyone and anything that can get us out of the pit as fast as possible, like distractions, addictions and overworking. I like to challenge the dark pit analogy and offer that there can be some value to our grief; a deepening of life through the healing power of the human experience. Something we love is gone forever and - if you can meet grief where it is and move with it - we can embrace our true humanity and the grief can transform us in profound ways. But, this is a marathon, not a race.
People sometimes worry ‘how long will I feel like this?’ or ‘when will this all be over?’ The truth is, for most people, the grief never ends, it just changes. Like a fever to the flu - slowly, we start to feel different, with a little more energy and capacity. It’s important to note that sorrow is not depression. Grief and anguish can crush our souls but, it’s not a sick brain. I see grief as a human condition - and - great love equals great grief. We have forgotten it’s ok to be sad and in fact, how to be sad. It’s the appropriate emotion when we lose someone we love and feeling our feelings when they come, is how we do this work.
Grief Regulates Our Addiction To Control
Anxiety is a natural condition of survival, especially when we feel we have lost control. Grief can have a lot of anxiety in it. Anxiety will become acute when we resist our emotions. Grief can rob us of energy, change our sleeping and eating habits, and suppress our immune system, making us more vulnerable to illness. Difficulty with concentration and memory makes us feel like we’re losing our sanity. Though it can seem like an impossible task some days, taking care of our bodies during this intense time enables our minds to better process the life-changing events that are unfolding before us. Many experience an emotional numbness immediately following a death. However, feelings will return often bringing a flood of intense and unexpected emotions. Anger, apathy, guilt, loneliness, sadness, irritability…the list seems endless. These will change from hour to hour, day to day, week to week. We can spend so much energy resisting our emotions instead of realigning our energy towards our healing.
