What Just Happened – Thoughts on Grief and Loss
I have been fortunate enough to get to work with many clients who are dealing with grief and loss. Perhaps it feels weird to say that I have been fortunate, but it’s truly how I see it. I am not fortunate in that the person across from me loss someone, but I am fortunate in the fact that I get to hold space for someone as they process one of the most difficult things we go through as human beings – losing something or someone we love.
Ben Franklin said “…in this world, nothing is certain except death and taxes.” I’m not sure I’ve met a person in this world who is a fan of either. For the moment, we’ll let the topic of taxes stand and choose to discuss the other certainty of life, death. Not a subject that brings joy or happiness to many, but something we’ll all inevitably deal with in our lives.
I would imagine that most of us remember the first time we heard of someone close to us dying. Perhaps a grandparent or a family member. Maybe as a child you remember your parents leaving to go to a funeral and wondered what was going on. I remember being young and unfortunately hearing about the death of my uncle. I didn’t know much of what was happening. I just knew my aunt and my other family members were very sad.
I think in some ways it’s just natural that we turn away from the sadness that death can cause. I mean who wants to dwell on sadness. If given a choice we would all most likely choose to experience as much happiness as we could stand. Unfortunately, life just doesn’t always give us that. In most cases, we can’t predict when we’ll experience the loss of someone. A courageous client of mine described it as this overflowing feeling of ‘What just happened?!” I’m not sure I could say it better myself.
Life is happening. You’re going through your day and just living life as you know how to do it best and then in an instant life is turned upside down. If you’ve ever lost someone that you love dearly, I would imagine you distinctly remember the moment you heard of their death. For those I have loss in my life I can vividly tell you where I was, what I was doing and much more. Why is this the case?
I would argue that the loss of someone we hold dear creates in some ways this pivot point or line of demarcation in our lives. What life was like with them. | Then moving into life without them. It changes the way we see the world and we’re left with this feeling of ‘What Just Happened?!” Clients have described this feeling in so many different ways that go far beyond sadness.
Feeling lost, hopeless, hurt, angry, alone, grateful, loved. I could go on and on.
One of the hardest parts of it all, however, is continuing on with our lives after we’ve loss someone we’ve loved. We grapple with what life may look like now that they’re gone. We grapple with the grieving process. Most importantly, we grapple with how we feel, deal with and make sense of all of the emotions we’re experiencing.
As I work with those who are dealing with grief and loss I have noticed that for mostly everyone there tends to be a common factor that appears at some point in the grieving process. There comes a point where people express their frustration in the fact that they’re “still grieving.” This usually comes with the phrase “I don’t feel like I’m doing this right.” This is a powerful moment. It’s a vulnerable statement of both frustration and fatigue almost saying “why haven’t I gotten through this yet.” That, however, is the thing about grief – it’s not something that we just get through. My response in these moments is usually to say “please tell me or show me someone who has grieved well.”
There is no blueprint for grief. It looks different and feels different for everyone. That is in some ways the gift that it brings. It requires you to genuinely FEEL in your own way, not in what you’ve seen in others or even read about. Elizabeth Gilbert describes it this way.
Grief is a force of energy that cannot be controlled or predicted. It comes and goes on its own schedule. Grief does not obey your plans or your wishes. Grief will do whatever it wants to you, whenever it wants to. In that way, grief has a lot in common with love.
This brings us to the precursor of grief – love. We grieve because we have loved. Grief only exist somewhere because there was once love there. I would dare to imagine that even though we experience grief, we would never choose to instead not have that joy we experienced in getting to know and love the person we loss. That love is the reason we miss them and the reason we grieve what we’ve loss.
So we don’t get through grief, we grow around the experience of grief. The image below does a great job of visualizing this. Grief doesn’t necessarily shrink or go away. Instead, we just grow around that grief and over time it feels like it takes up less and less of us.
So I encourage you today. If you’re going through grief or loss or even experienced it in the past and feel like it’s something that has become a struggle – reach out to me and let’s look to help you grow around the grief. I will provide you space to grieve and space to heal. When we walk through hard times in life we don’t have to walk alone. I would consider it an honor to walk through your grief by your side. Feel free to reach out to me phone, text or email – all which can be found on my contact page.