Overcoming Grief

Talking about grief is as difficult as it is essential. Especially due to the many emotions which surround the heart as insects surround the body in a night jungle. Like continuing to clean a wound, continuing to talk about grief with a trusted other can greatly assist the heart-healing process. A widow recently sent me an anonymous paragraph about grief which helped her. Merely naming emotions grants some relief. Here’s the paragraph:

“Grief includes a wide range of emotions including sadness and despair, anger and resentment, loneliness and confusion, guilt and denial, a lack of self-esteem and self-confidence, panic and anxiety, relief and calm, fear and exhaustion, hope and a sense of strength.”

A few comments about each of these emotions:

Sadness: for what will never be, and nostalgia for what was.

Despair: an acute helplessness to alter what is, and maybe what will be.

Anger: your deceased loved one has in fact abandoned you, left you with a mess to clean up – without that person being around to help.

Resentment: your deceased loved one got to be the one to vacate this life, leaving you behind to fend for yourself.

Loneliness: you are painfully aware of an empty space of silence where there had been a loving life form.

Confusion: what are you to do and when, and how will you know if you are doing the right thing? Your deceased loved one is not there to assist in clarification.

Guilt: a numbing sense that you have done something wrong, that there was something you could and should have done differently, which could have meant either that your loved one would still be alive, or at least would have better known the extent of your love.

Denial: you need times to block out your grief, to believe that your life has regained its needed normalcy; that, for right now, “Everything is just fine.”

Lack of self-esteem: grief dashes your heart to the ground, where you often find yourself in tears, whether wet or dry ones. Death humbles as no other force: you are thrown back on your own devices, and must do for yourself what the other used to do for or with you. Esteem builds slowly from little successive successes.

Lack of self-confidence: how can you do at your age what you have never done before, taking care of things you had not needed to worry about?

Panic: can you make it through this? Fear: is this too much; will you fail?

Anxiety: a vague foreboding of terrors about to happen, but you don’t know what or when or from where.

Relief: at least the watching and waiting are over, the dying completed.

Calm: there is a strangely peaceful eye to this emotional storm, which you can enter only when you let go and let be.

Fear: the future you did not want and have not fully prepared for, is now your present. The demons of the “what if” and “could be” harass you.

Exhaustion: it takes enormous energy to grieve and to continue walking through your life while bearing your private pain.

Hope: a small voice inside says, “Hold on; this too will pass; things will get better; tomorrow will be worth living.”

Sense of strength: when it comes you don’t ask from where, you just take it. Strength is there when you need it, even if it waits to appear until the exact moment you have to have it. You will make it through this; you will survive to love again.