Tag: Grief and Grieving

David Kessler on the Difference Between Mourning and Grief

By David Kessler

For the dead and the living, we must bear witness.
–Elie Wiesel

Each person’s grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn’t mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.

This need is hardwired in us, since our emotions bind us to one another, and in those bonds is the key to our survival. From the moment we’re born, we realize we’re not alone. Our brains are equipped with mirroring neurons, which is why when the mother smiles, the baby smiles back. This continues into adulthood. I remember walking down the street one day and a man said to me, “Howdy.” I’m not usually someone who says “Howdy.” But I instinctively said back to him, “Howdy!” This is more than copying each other’s expressions. It’s also about the emotions underlying the expressions. The mirroring neurons enable mother and child to pick up on each other’s emotions.

Dr. Edward Tronick is part of a psychology team that made a short video that shows what happens if babies do not feel their emotions reflected and acknowledged by those around them. First we see a ten-month-old sitting in a high chair, eyes wide and happily fixed on his mother’s smiling face. The baby and mother mirror each other as I described above. One laughs, then the other laughs; the baby points and the mother looks in the direction in which he’s pointing. But then at the direction of the researchers, the mother turns away, and when she turns back to the baby, she has a blank look on her face. The confused baby does everything to try to get a reaction out of her. He cries and screams in distress. This is an innate reaction, because children know on a subconscious level that they need others for survival. If their survival is dependent on someone who is unable to be truly present for them, they suffer.

The same is true for adults. If they are grieving, they need to feel their grief acknowledged and reflected by others. But in our hyperbusy world, grief has been minimized and sanitized. You get three days off work after a loved one dies and then everyone expects you to carry on like nothing happened. There are fewer and fewer opportunities for those around you to bear witness to your pain, and this can be very isolating.

I was touring in Australia when I met a researcher who told me about the work she was doing to study the way of life in the northern indigenous villages of Australia. One of the villagers told her that the night someone dies, everyone in the village moves a piece of furniture or something else into their yard. The next day, when the bereaved family wakes up and looks outside, they see that everything has changed since their loved one died—not just for them but for everyone. That’s how these communities witness, and mirror, grief. They are showing in a tangible way that someone’s death matters. The loss is made visible.

In this country, too, it was once common for us to come together as a community to bear witness to the grief experienced when a loved one died. But in our current culture, the mourner is made to feel that though his or her own world has been shattered, everyone else’s world goes on as if nothing has changed. There are too few rituals to commemorate mourning, and too little time allotted to it.

Grief should unite us. It is a universal experience. If I’m talking to someone with a physical ailment, I can listen and empathize, but I may never have that particular problem. When I’m with someone whose loved one died, however, I know I’ll be in their shoes someday and I try to understand what they are feeling. Not to change it—just to acknowledge it fully. I feel privileged when someone shares their pain and grief with me. The act of witnessing someone’s vulnerability can bring the person out of isolation if the witnessing is done without judgment.

Too often outsiders who may have the best of intentions will suggest to a bereaved person that it’s time to move on, embrace life, and let go of grief. But grief should be a no-judgment zone. Those who understand what you’re going through will never judge you or think your grief is out of proportion or too prolonged. Grief is what’s going on inside of us, while mourning is what we do on the outside. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey. It does not have prescribed dimensions and it does not end on a certain date.

When people ask me how long they’re going to grieve, I ask them, “How long will your loved one be dead? That’s how long. I don’t mean you’ll be in pain forever. But you will never forget that person, never be able to fill the unique hole that has been left in your heart. There is what I call the one-year myth—we should be done and complete with all grieving in one year. Not remotely true. In the first year of your loss, you’re likely to mourn and grieve intensely. After that, your grief will probably fluctuate. It will seem to lessen, then something will trigger it, and you’ll find yourself back in the full pain of loss. In time it will hurt less often and with less intensity. But it will always be there.”

That’s about as specific as I can get in answering the question. As vague as it is, it still doesn’t cover all the possibilities. Over many years of grief work, I’ve come to realize that if I’ve seen one person in grief, I’ve only seen that one person in grief. I can’t compare one griever to another, even if they’re in the same family. One sister cries a lot and the other one doesn’t. One son is vulnerable and raw. The other just wants to move on. Some people are expressive. Others shy away from their feelings. Some have more feelings. Some have less. Some are more productive and practical in their grieving style. They have a “buckle down and move on” mentality. We can mistakenly think that people who show no visible signs of pain should be in a grief group, getting in touch with and sharing their feelings. But if that is not their style in life, it won’t be in grief, either. They must experience loss in their own way. Suggesting otherwise will not be helpful to them.

*

In our modern world, our grief is often witnessed online. When I post quotes about grief on social media, I notice different kinds of responses. If I post hopeful, optimistic quotes about healing, they give hope to many people, but don’t resonate with others. Those who are in a dark place aren’t ready to hear about hope, often because they’re at the beginning of the grieving process and their grief is too acute to allow for any other emotions. They just want the darkness of their grief to be seen and acknowledged. Their tears are evidence of their love, proof that the person who died was someone who mattered deeply. If I post something like, “Today it feels like the pain will never end,” or “Grief feels like a dark cloud that encompasses the whole sky,” that will resonate with them. It mirrors and validates their feelings, which can be far more consoling than trying to find something positive in the situation.

Some grieve with darkness, some with light, some with both, depending on where they are in the cycle of grief. It would be a mistake to conclude that one is better than the other or that there’s a right way to grieve. There are just different ways to grieve, different feelings evoked by loss. This is also true of our relationship to hope. Hope can be like oxygen to people in grief. For others, however, especially in the early stages, it can feel invalidating. “In my sorrow, how dare you want me to feel hopeful . . . about what? Do you need me to hope to make you feel more comfortable?”

Hope has a very close relationship with meaning. In the same way our meaning changes, so does hope. Sometimes when I work with someone stuck in grief, I will say, “It sounds like hope died with your loved one. It seems all is lost.”

Surprisingly they perk up. “Yes, that’s it.”

They feel witnessed. I often say, “A loved one’s death is permanent, and that is so heartbreaking. But I believe your loss of hope can be temporary. Until you can find it, I’ll hold it for you. I have hope for you. I don’t want to invalidate your feelings as they are, but I also don’t want to give death any more power than it already has. Death ends a life, but not our relationship, our love, or our hope.”

Sometimes I meet someone in grief who tells me that a family member or friend said something terrible—which often turns out to be some variation of “time heals all” or “be happy your loved one is at peace now.” Such statements can make the bereaved think that their feelings have not been witnessed. Most of us want to say something helpful, but we may not realize that our timing and delivery are off. If the griever needs to remain in a dark place for a while, then trying to offer some kind of cheer will be very hurtful. We must really see the person we are trying to comfort. Loss can become more meaningful—and more bearable—when reflected, and reflected accurately, in another’s eyes.

We also have to remember that our own thoughts about the one who died are irrelevant. Maybe we think our friend’s mother was so awful that she wasn’t worth grieving over. Or we know that our sister’s husband had been unfaithful and wonder why she is nonetheless sobbing over his death. What we think has nothing at all to do with the feelings of those who are in grief, and they will not be comforted by hearing us criticize their loved ones as not being deserving of their sorrow.

People who mourn the loss of their pets often comment on how little people understand about their grief. In the months that followed the death of my son, one of my dear friends experienced his own loss. His beloved dog died at the age of 16. When I reached out to him to express my condolences, he was taken aback by my concern. “Your loss is so much worse than mine,” he said. I couldn’t see his tears and think that his loss was any less painful or meaningful than mine. Every loss has meaning, and all losses are to be grieved—and witnessed. I have a rule on pet loss. “If the love is real, the grief is real.” The grief that comes with loss is how we experience the depths of our love, and love takes many forms in this life.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Psychotherapist Megan Devine on the impossibility of taking pain away from your partner, the difficulty of two people grieving one person, and how loss can impact sex.

By Sophia Benoit

Like so many people, I’m fascinated, consumed, and appalled by death. I read books about it, I occasionally write hypothetical eulogies for loved ones in my head, and I even have a tattoo that says memento mori—Latin for “remember to die.” And as part of my preoccupation with death, I’ve found myself wondering how my boyfriend and I will handle it when one of us inevitably loses someone.

How partners show up—or don’t—after a loss can profoundly impact the relationship, either strengthening it or exposing the cracks. Ideally, a partner knows what to do and say, but many people struggle with exactly how to respond.

I asked friends who’ve lost someone about what their partner did that helped and, on the flip side, what really didn’t. When my friend Sam’s grandpa died, her ex was pretty reluctant to engage with her about it at all. “Anytime I would bring up my grandpa, he would seem visibly uncomfortable, like he was not excited about the emotions he was going to have to respond to. We unsurprisingly broke up,” she said, citing these stilted conversations as a big part of that decision.

Another friend of mine, Glenn, gushed about how wonderful his partner, Rob, was when his mother passed: “On the night she died, when I called, he didn’t say anything. He came over and just held me as I cried, laid in bed with me so I wasn’t alone. He never offered any platitudes, or really condolences in any typical way. He gave me the space to reckon with a loss that each person can only figure how to handle in their own way.”

In long-term relationships, chances are that one or both partners will experience the death of a loved one; knowing how to support one another as best as possible is invaluable. So I spoke to Megan Devine, psychotherapist and author of It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand, about how to support your partner through grief.

GQ: Both my partner and I have older parents—and very different relationships with our parents—so I’ve spent a lot of time thinking about what we’ll do when the time comes and how we’ll help one another.
Devine: That’s good that you’re already thinking about that! Most likely, your parents will die before you. The time to have conversations like this is before anybody dies. We practice fire drills, so that in the event of an emergency, these things aren’t new to us. It’s really hard in fresh grief to have a high-level, highly skilled conversation about your emotional needs. That’s asking a lot of a person when they’re in pain.

You can make some good guesses, but until you’re in the situation, you won’t know. But by opening those conversations beforehand, you’ll be able to say things like, “I know we talked about this and I thought I was going to need this, but this is different than anything I expected. Can we try this instead?”

So, what can a partner’s role in a time of grief be? Can they actually do anything?
Well, yes and no. We look at the people we love, and we see them in pain and we want to take that pain away from them. That’s a normal human response. But, you can’t. It’s not actually possible.

All the things that we normally think of to say to do that, like “Your dad wouldn’t want you to be sad,” or “Your mom lived a nice, long life” don’t work. Look at the second half of that sentence, or what I call the ghost words. There’s an implied “…so, stop feeling so bad.”

If I see you and say, “What’s up?” and you say, “My dog’s really sick, and we don’t know if he’s gonna make it,” and I say, “Well, at least it’s sunny out!” I just completely dismissed what you just told me, even if I did what I think I’m supposed to do, which is cheer you up and tell you to look on the bright side. The biggest thing for people to remember is it’s not your job to take away somebody’s pain. It is your job to accompany them inside it. And what that looks like is going to be different for everybody.

So, are there concrete, universal things that someone can do to help their partner?
When someone’s person dies, life around them still goes on. There might be kids that need to be taken care of, laundry that needs to be done, a dog that needs to be walked—whatever you can do to take over the daily life activities for that person to give them the space to fall apart, or be quiet, or slow down.

A lot of people feel like, “If I’m not cheering them up, what am I supposed to do? Let them be sad?” Well, one, yes. But two, it’s not that you do nothing—it’s that everything you do is in service of making things gentler for that person. Taking the trash out. Ordering a meal-delivery service. Offering to take care of pets. Picking up dry cleaning.

What is something that’s difficult about grief, particularly in romantic relationships? I imagine that loss is either a binding agent of sorts or a massive stumbling block, and it can really go either way.
When you’re talking about romantic partners, sometimes they’re grieving the same person. A really big thing to remember is that everyone grieves differently, and even when one person dies, you’re each grieving a different person. You lost two different people.

This is very gendered, but often the male or male-identified person feels like they need to be strong or brave for the family or keep their shit together. The female-identified person can feel like, “Why don’t you have any emotions around this? I can’t even get out of bed because I’m crying so much, and you seem to be stoic and fine.” One person cries, one person doesn’t cry. Any expression of grief is normal. Everybody has the right to grieve differently.

So what do you do when you’re both grieving the same person?
Ideally, if you’re the one grieving, you’re able to say, “My dad died and I want to acknowledge the fact that your father-in-law died, and this is going to be impacting you too. I don’t know how available I’m going to be to talk with you about that, but I want to let you know that I see it. And to the best of my capacity or ability, I’m willing to listen to what this is like for you.”

What would you tell couples, then, about what might help them both go through the grieving process?
The time to prepare for these things is in daily life before grief. This means having challenging conversations about what you need, don’t need, and how to manage that together. Those are not easy conversations. This is why I really stress getting accustomed to what therapists call “process conversations,” outside of an emergency, like the loss of a loved one. Many people have an aversion to these types of conversations because it’s not normal for us.

To ask you to suddenly learn how to use really grown-up, ninja-level communication skills amid an already challenging time is asking a lot of people. But if you’ve started, it’s easier to lean on that in times of need.

Exactly. Grief brings up all these feelings that we have limited experience talking about. Especially for couples, it dramatically alters daily life, and little things we take for granted can become really fraught. For example, when is it okay for me to start trying to initiate sex again? In a month? The next night? Should I actively try to engage my partner about what they’re feeling? Wait for them to bring it up? We don’t know what we’re doing.
Yes! “When is it okay to invite my partner to have sex again after their dad dies?” Well, we don’t know. But you know what you can do? ASK! These are questions that we should be talking about more. You can say something like, “I’m not really sure what your clues are that you feel ready for me to initiate. Can we talk about that?” Being willing to have a conversation about it is the key. Have the conversation!

In my experience, people are really afraid to sound foolish or weird. I’m a strong proponent for prefacing conversations like this with “I know this might sound weird, but…”
Precisely. You might be scared that it’s going to be weird or awkward, but sweetie, it’s all awkward. You can either ignore the issue, potentially allowing things to get worse, or you can address it and feel weird and have a much better chance of things smoothing out and resolving. Both paths are awkward and uncomfortable. Only one sets you up for potential success.

Okay, I’m sure there are 5,600 things, but what is something that our culture misunderstands about grief?
Because we don’t tend to talk about grief at all in our culture, we have really skewed ideas of what’s normal. The first thing is that grief lasts as long as love lasts. When your dad dies, there’s not going to be any time in the future when you’re going to stop missing him. He’ll always be your dad. As long as you love your dad, there will be grief present. Grief will shift and change—it’s not that you’re gonna be rocking in a corner wearing all black for the rest of your existence.

There’s nothing wrong with grief, and I think that’s surprising for people. We [preach] these transformative narratives of the cranky old widower who is only cranky because he hasn’t found a new love, and once he does, everything is okay again and grief goes away. That’s just not the way it works. That’s not reality. Because we don’t talk about grief as a normal part of relationships, we don’t know what’s normal and healthy, and everybody grieves in a different way. Somebody might find comfort or solace in humor, while someone else might not. Just because grief can look messy and emotional, doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with it.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

There are pages worth of downsides to the grieving process, what is often not talked about though is the secret superpower so many get.

By Noelle Rollins

I was talking with a friend last month as the one year anniversary of her husband’s passing was approaching, “Noelle, I feel like I’m in a freaking movie, like it can’t be real. All the stuff happening.”

She went on to explain people who seems to come into her life daily during the last year as if on cue to give her a message or sign. The perfectly accidental meeting of others with stories to share for her benefit. Odd meetings that she would have brushed off in the past, now she was hyper-focused on allowing them to unfold. I couldn’t help but nod in agreement. Yes, I knew exactly what she was talking about. It’s the grieving superpower.

After losing someone who was a part of your daily life, there is a time that follows that event where life feels like it has been busted into millions of pieces. Every daily routine now altered, every holiday forever changed.

Imagine yourself in a tunnel, with laser like focus on processing one thing; grief. All attention is on trying to understand the loss, remembering your loved one, and figuring out how to move forward. All other sounds are now muffled in the background, things that seems to matter before often seem frivolous during this time. This time, although a time I wouldn’t wish on anyone… does bring it’s own gifts as well.

If you are in the midst of this time… I’m sending you so much love. It’s hard. It is full of unknowns and times where the floor feels to drop out from under you. Here are 7 ways to honor the superhero grief period:

1) Write in a journal – during this time of intensity it can feel as if things will be this way forever. Write things down. Write your feelings, write your memories. Write all that you notice. Signs from spirit, dreams, the kindness of others. Write them all down. Continue writing when you feel anger, sadness, fear and yes, even joys. During this time of hyper-awareness and simplified life it’s the time to capture what you can to gift yourself with later.

2) Know that you are not alone – find your people. Sometimes those around us are understanding and can be an incredible support system. Others are not that lucky and don’t have people around that are able to support you. Find online grief groups, read blogs, read books (mine is coming in 2020). You do not have to experience this time alone. Being so in tune with grief and our loss it can leave everything else as a blur. Don’t be afraid to find help to rejoin and bring focus back onto that outer world as well.

3) There is no proper timetable for grief – I’ve heard too many stories of a boyfriend or spouse expressing frustration that “your not over it yet”. In-laws who don’t get it. Friends who seem annoyed that all you talk about is your loss. Family who wants you to move forward and quit “moping”. People try to understand but we all handle things differently. My advice is this: trust your knowing. Find people who can help you move forward and honor your grief. If you are not able to handle your career, your kids, your life then I encourage you to find help. Find a counselor, pastor, or therapist who can walk you through honoring your grief while also honoring your other life commitments.

4) Gather wisdom from this time – I have always tried to gather any nuggets of wisdom or purpose from all hard times. Is there something you could take from this unthinkable time that could help others? Is there a new perspective you’ve gained? Finding truth and wisdom doesn’t mean you are glad the event happened. It means that if you have to walk through this fire… at least try to harvest what you can from it so you can reach out a hand to the next person to help them through the fire as well.

5) Find a way to honor the memory of your loved one. There are many options, find one that resonates with you or your memory of your loved one. Write about them, create a photo album, find a creative outlet such as drawing or singing, crafting, cooking or even redecorating. When my mom passed my sisters and I gathered up all her favorite recipes along with photos of her cooking with her grandchildren and put together a cookbook. That following Christmas we gave those cookbooks to all my mom’s siblings and our for each of us. It was a therapeutic process creating that book and allowed us hours of conversation and reliving memories of our mom in the process. Even 11 years later I can now share those recipes and memories of my mom with my son who never go to meet her.

6) Honor your knowing and the signs – don’t waste your energy trying to convince others of your beliefs or experiences that have happened. The night after my mom passed away I had a very clear dream that turned out to reveal a place that we later held her funeral. I also got signs almost immediately from her. I kept a journal where I wrote about the dreams and signs. I made a decision early on that I would be open about my experience but I really didn’t give any care to whether anyone believed me or not. I knew what I knew. Just as my friend shared with me about her experiences, pay attention to those who enter your life and gift you with conversations and perspective.

A feather that appeared on my paintbrush while creating a painting to honor signs from spirit.

7) Take photos. I wrote about this extensively here but I’ll sum up my point with this: If I could tell every person who has just lost someone dear to them one thing it would be, “take photographs”. Go into your loved one’s space and take a photo of the way the reading glasses are sitting on the side table, how the spice cabinet looks or the jacket hanging on the hook. Photograph the wall of framed photos, the collection of ball caps or figurines. Capture the yard, the tools on a workbench in the garage, the view from the kitchen table, even your favorite chair.

In the year following my mom’s death the walls were repainted, furniture replaced and passed down to us kids. Slowly my mom’s decorating style and personality were taken out of the house. I’m so grateful to this day of any photos I have where I can see parts of her decorating and style in the background.

This time will pass. Grip it with all you can while you are in this sacred, painful, hyper-focused emotional and mental place. Even though you’d never choose to be in this situation… someday you’ll look back and realize that this hard time was sacred. There was a bond still to your loved one in your daily thoughts and activities.

Sending you much love and wishes for healing and the gift of memories of your loved one. I hope you find these 7 tips helpful. What would you add? It’s a beautiful thing when we can all help one another navigate through grief. While I certainly don’t have all the answers, I happily share what I can in hopes that even one thing can help someone else who is experiencing a world shattering loss right now.

Best wishes to you, Noelle

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

By Jaime Herndon

My grandmother died from metastatic breast cancer a little over a year ago. At nearly 93, her death was not a surprise, exactly, but I just never actually thought she would die, much less from the invasive cancer that she had overcome once before. Even her oncologist had told me at the beginning of her recurrence that the breast cancer wouldn’t kill her; old age or her heart disease would. We were wrong.

My grandmother was the last living grandparent I had. At the age of 38, I knew I was lucky to have any grandparents left. But when she died on January 30, 2019, I wasn’t prepared for the devastation that snuck in—gradually, and then very suddenly.

Grief can be decimating. But as everyone knows, time doesn’t stop for your pain. It doesn’t even slow down, no matter how much you want it to. The kid still needs to be washed and fed and taken to preschool, and you still have deadlines to meet, work to produce, and days to get through.

After my grandmother died (even a year later, those words just don’t look right; they can’t be right) it was hard to write non-work things, but one thing I was still able to do was read. I read and read and read. I read over 250 books in 2019. When my son went to bed for the night, I’d finish up any work from the day and then sit down with a book or three. On the page, I found escape. I found story and distraction.

When it had become clear that my grandmother was in her last weeks, I turned to Joan Didion, as I had in the past when other family members were dying. The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights were familiar in their grief; in their measured examination of liminal spaces and how life changes in the ordinary instant.

In the past, being a medical/healthcare person and one who loves oncology, there’s a chance I would have dived into medical books. But this time, I just couldn’t. I had books come across my desk about hospice, a “good death,” and dying, and if I’m being honest, I would often really want to read these, but could rarely actually do it. A few months after my grandmother’s death, I read Edwidge Danticat’s slim volume of The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story. I wanted to know how to write about this—and this book was perfect. A mix of memoir, craft, and instruction, it was just the amount of each that I needed.

As time went on, I read some books about death and cancer. Sunita Puri’s book about becoming a palliative care physician, That Good Night: Life and Medicine in the Eleventh Hour, was a fascinating read. I approached it as research for a potential project, so I was able to read it with a bit of detachment. The Undying by Anne Boyer, a memoir about breast cancer, was a bit harder to read. The prose itself is brilliant and strong, and I often had to pause and think about what I had just read. But it also cut a bit close to the bone, and I took much longer to read this one than I normally would have. Once More We Saw Stars, by Jayson Greene, was a book that I gravitated to early on, but when the ARC arrived, I was consumed with ambivalence. It took weeks to get through the first 20 pages. As the mother of a toddler, as someone still reeling from the loss of a loved one—it may not have been the best choice of a read just then. But I was eventually able to steel myself and get through, and it was a deeply raw, haunting book that I still think about today. I found threads of connection in it and held on.

I was sent a copy of In the Time of the Butterflies, by Julia Alvarez when the 25^th anniversary edition was released. I’d somehow never read Alvarez before. The story about living under a dictator, political tyranny, and rebellion felt especially necessary, and her prose is gorgeous, with the characters well-drawn and pulling you in. Every time I put this book down, I resented having to leave the pages and rejoin the outside world. It was a much-needed escape.

I read memoirs that turned the genre on its head like Ordinary Girls by Jaquira Diaz,  How We Fight for Our Lives by Saeed Jones, and Girl on Film by Cecil Castellucci. I read genre-defying, beautiful books like PET by Akwaeke Emezi and quietly haunting novels like The Last True Poets of the Sea by Julia Drake. I would read and reread sentences and pages of these books because the prose was so precise and cutting, or because it was so inventive and tumbled off my tongue, creating whole worlds in my head as I moved through the stories. Life was packed onto every single page of so many books I read this year, and maybe there’s something to that when you’re dealing with grief—seeing pages that can barely contain the story of a life reminds you of how much living there’s still to be done.

Looking at my reading in 2019, I read many fantastic books—books that took me out of my comfort zone and made me think. But I also used books as escape and distraction. If I was reading, I couldn’t dwell on how much I missed my grandmother and wished she could see what my son was doing now. I couldn’t think about how much I missed going to dinner with her multiple times a week, or how many times I would go to call her and then realize it was useless. Does this diminish the books I read this year? I’m not sure. I think I’d be better focused now than I was last year, and I plan on rereading some of my favorites to see what I might have missed the first time around. But reading, as it always has been, was a balm. It helped me get through a difficult year. For that, for the stories I savored and the characters I met and things I learned, I am grateful.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!

Do we just not have time to grieve anymore? Not expressing how we feel and holding in our grief affects our wellbeing, jobs, relationships and life. In today’s world, everyone busy- work, social life, family, social media, events.. the to do list is endless! Ask anyone you haven’t seen in a while how they’ve been […]

By Juliette Mullen

Do we just not have time to grieve anymore?

Not expressing how we feel and holding in our grief affects our wellbeing, jobs, relationships and life.

In today’s world, everyone busy- work, social life, family, social media, events.. the to do list is endless!

Ask anyone you haven’t seen in a while how they’ve been and they’re likely to answer, “okay, busy!”. This isn’t surprising to hear, but something that I didn’t expect in the midst of our very busy lives is how many people who have recently suffered a loss are just too busy to grieve.

Let’s face it, we all have bills, responsibilities and commitments so, for some, taking the time to grieve and heal, to find support may feel like a luxury. Not only from a financial perspective, but also time- they have so much to keep up with.

With life moving so fast and so many things to do, and in a lot of cases, so many people to take care of, do we really give ourselves the chance and time we need to grieve?

There are many reasons we may not allow ourselves time to grieve- and they may not always be what you’d think. Work, responsibilities, being a parent, avoidance, lack of awareness and not realising we need support, sometimes even stubbornness.

We all need to ask ourselves, (and answer honestly!) is it actually about not having the time, space, money or is it a case of not making the time? Some find it easier to throw themselves into a project, to the kids, to work.. as it is “easier” than facing the grief and the emotions that come up. I’m sure “easy” is the last word most people who have experienced a loss would use, but let’s reflect on that. If we are always moving, always busy, and always worried about everyone and everything else, then there just isn’t time to think about our self, our own needs, our emotions or our pain.

I recognise this dilemma all too well. When I suffered my own loss in life, the loss of a baby, the loss of a parent, the loss of a marriage. The loss of dreams, hopes and a part of me. Grief is both real and measurable, Scientists now know that loss changes us forever. Whether its the death of a parent, or a child- it is one of the most emotional and universal human experiences. Yet, loss is something that we all inevitably face at some point in our lives.

However, ungrieved losses takes it toll on our hearts and can make us feel disconnected from life. We think we can avoid it by being busy but over time, we shut down our emotions, little by little until we are so out of alignment with ourselves, that in some cases we don’t even recognise ourselves anymore.

It’s important to recognise our own needs, asking our self what we really need and recognise how important self care is. Often people suggest grievers eat well, go for walks, get rest, have a cup of tea. Of course, the act of self care itself (whatever it is) can be pleasant in itself, but these quiet activities allow for just that: PEACE and QUIET -and a time to reflect and take that inner journey to allow us to sit with our emotions and heal. It’s something every griever needs, but the busy griever just doesn’t seem to get enough of.

Complete Article ↪HERE↩!