Grief – A Normal Part of Life

This is a follow-up to my previous post on Loss. 

Before we can let go of what was and move on to the reality of what is, we first have to grieve the loss.   It is the confronting and working through of the painful feelings that eventually enables the freeing up of the bond to the loss and the subsequent movement ahead.

The word grief comes from the Latin verb meaning ‘to burden’.  A grieving person is burdened with a heavy load of emotions.

To allow ourselves to grieve is the hard part.  Nobody wants to feel these most intense painful emotions.  But it is only in the going through them that we can come through them to a place of healing.  I want to emphasize that this is a process, not a state or product.  It is not linear – boom,boom, boom – as if to say, ‘O.K. I finished my anger, now I can move to acceptance’;  it is fluid and we can flow through many feelings over and over again.  Just when we think we’re done feeling the rage of injustice, something may hit us and we’re back feeling the rawness of anger once again.

These feelings are all normal and natural. 

We’re afraid that if we sink too low into the pit of the pain, we won’t be able to get out.  But in reality, it’s just the opposite.  It’s in the staying with them, feeling them and permitting their expression that facilitates the eventual healing.

Ram Dass in his book, How Can I Help, says it so beautifully:

As we play the edge of our pain – gently opening, acknowledging, and allowing – the suffering it has caused diminishes.  If we further dissolve the boundaries, letting ourselves enter into the pain and the pain enter into us, we can see the possibility of going beyond it to where the heart is freer.  We’ve never been so vulnerable, so defenseless, and yet somehow so safe.  The surrender we were so frightened of turns out to be not defeat but a kind of victory.”

Unfortunately nowadays, too many of us look for the quick and easy way out, of pain.  We numb, avoid, distract ourselves.  These inhibiting acts just push these {grieving} emotions further inward where they fester and eventually return later, sometimes camouflaged and possibly giving way to a worse condition.

We need to promote:

patience for the process –  there is no time table, no calendar, no date of completion.

permission to ourselves and others to experience and go through this most natural, normal and inevitable part of life known as grieving one’s losses.

When my middle daughter, Nava, was diagnosed as having developmental disabilities, I went through this grieving process intensely; and I could not have done it alone.  I had the help of a wonderful grief therapist, Dr. Ken Moses.

My next post will be about just this:  expressing and sharing our grief.

 

How have you handled those painful emotions?

Thank you for coming by.  Please share your thoughts/feelings in the Comment section.