On Grief

Someone I dearly love is currently walking a sad road of grief and loss. My heart aches for her and her family. In these times, I find myself wishing I had better words, more wisdom and comfort to share. But there is no definitive manual on how to grieve. There are books to read, there is good advice, there are principles that generally help people move through loss in productive ways. But every person, every loss, every situation is unique.

I don’t think our culture does very well with grief. We like instant things and quick fixes, clear answers and easy solutions. But grief is hard and long and messy. We are uncomfortable with grief and afraid of saying the wrong thing, so we tend not to speak of it. But avoiding is almost never the best response to things that are hard to talk about, so I want to try. To share some thoughts on grief, some things I have learned through my own experiences and from walking alongside those who are grieving.

There is no right or wrong way to grieve a loss. In fact, the only thing I know definitively about grief is that it is hard and painful, and almost always lasts longer than we think it should. Our job is not to take away the grief of those we love, but to witness it and love them in it.

The saying goes that time heals all wounds. I don’t believe it. I believe that grieving always takes time, but time by itself doesn’t magically ease the hurt. We must enter into our pain, we must care for our pain, care for ourselves, and allow others to care for us. We must let ourselves feel it, let our tears fall. Time itself is not enough. We must enter into our grief.

This looks different for every person, but it almost always involves community. It involves sharing our tears and our pain with those who love us. My friend did something very brave in the face of her grief. She shared her story and her heart and her sadness. She allowed others to witness her loss and affirm that it mattered.

Grief needs space and time. Grief comes in waves and cycles. There is no timeline that says “you should be over this by now.” If you are mourning now, whatever the loss, please be patient with yourself. If you love someone who is mourning, be patient with them. Be present with them, and remember that grief takes time.

Anne Lamott wrote about losing a loved one, “You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly—that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.”

And I believe the same is true for all different kinds of loss: loss of health, loss of a dream you clung to, the end of a relationship, the end of a job. Healing doesn’t mean we return to exactly who we were before the loss. It means that we carry the loss with us, but that we remember how to pick up hope and joy, and we carry those too.

#grief