On Being with Grief
Grief support for the times when being a human is complicated
What does it mean to grieve, and why is it so difficult for us to understand the grief of someone else? Today we’re talking about the painful permanence of grief in our lives and how to navigate the messiness of hurt, humanity and healing.
Before you begin, remember that our professionals are always here to help
There is more than one type of grief
Grief comes in a spectrum as broad as love. From the loss of a baby to the loss of a routine, grief is a real and complex part of the human experience. Often, we associate grief with death. But there is so much more to loss than the end of a life. You may grieve something like the steady rhythm of life when a huge shift occurs, like the COVID-19 pandemic. You may grieve a job, a future, an idea, or a person.
How long does it take to recover from a loss?
Despite what we may feel or believe about loss and grief, we aren’t going to “get better” from it. Grief is not an illness. Though you may choose therapy to support you in navigating your journey with it, there’s nothing to cure. Grief—and finding your way through it—doesn’t stop and it can’t be cured.
Loss transforms your life and along the way, that may mean so many things. It doesn’t mean you’ll never be happy again, or that you’ll never heal. It simply means that life will look different after you lose something. Much like love indelibly reshapes the landscape of your life, loss does too.
We aren’t going to fix this - so what happens now?
The discomfort we feel when confronted with someone’s pain can make us feel like we must fix it. Likewise, after loss it may feel like you’re walking around with people looking through you. They’ll only see half your story and you can’t relate to their attempts to smooth over the loss. For outsiders looking in, it can be painful to acknowledge the truth of grief: that we aren’t going to fix your pain and there is no help that will heal the hurt of this. But glossing over the magnitude of the loss isn’t the answer, and it can be more painful for the hurting soul in front of us when we look away from that truth.
Being a human is complicated and grief is too. What happens now is that we turn toward the need to create space from grief with grace. As a human, we want to step away from the pain that someone else is going through. Whether it’s a small inconvenience or a catastrophic loss, solution seeking is a natural desire. Our first step and the next step is to learn not to react in the way we’re so deeply ingrained to do.
Why do we have a culture of discomfort around loss?
After a death or a loss, there is a period of mourning. In the first couple of weeks after that loss, people will rally around those at the center of the pain. They bring comfort, food, support and offers of “anything you need”. But those offers drift and dry as people move away from the pain and return to the normal rhythm of life. They want to return to the comfort of love, and carry the gratitude of not living with that grief into their daily life.
We are a culture of fixers and if it cannot be fixed, we desensitize to the pain around us until we can create space so we don’t feel it acutely. As a culture and maybe just as a human experience, we want to fix hurt so we don’t have to feel helpless. We want to return to love.
Grief and love are interconnected so deeply that we cannot disentangle them. In order to lose something, it must first matter to us. Loss happens where love lived and it’s deeply rooted in our humanity. It hurts to feel the aftermath of that.
For so many people, and certainly as a cultural standard, we want to fix hurt and move quickly past it. But when we force positive thoughts and solutions at someone who is hurting, we often cause more hurt.
How to help yourself (or someone else) in grief
What I am about to say sounds both too simple and completely radical but I hope that you can take it on board.
Be there with them.
It’s that simple, and that incredibly difficult. Instinctually when someone we love is hurting, we want to fix it. Don’t do that. Instead of trying to fix, feeling, or offer input, show up and stay. Sit in that moment, that pain, that truth and the consuming depth of emotional richness. Stay with the grief and the person who is feeling it. Check your judgment at the door and whatever helpful thing you want to say, don’t. Be in that moment and the reality of grief without a solution.
Just be there. Sit in the uncomfortable moments, hear the pain and possibility. Leave the fear of being helpless, and the desire to fix this, somewhere else for another time. Sit with what you feel instead of what you wish was real.
Words of affirmation after loss
After sitting in grief you may wonder what’s coming or how to move on from that pain without spiraling. We want to leave you with three affirmations to try on. Use them however you need to move through this world from moment to moment, and through your grief in the same way. We’ve created these affirmations for you after learning from expert grief educators and our own experiences with loss. Take these words and hold them in the ways that feel comforting today. Tomorrow, that might look different.
“Grief is part of love, so I can’t get it wrong.”
“Hope and happiness will not betray my loss.”
“It’s okay not to be okay.”
You can’t solve grief, fail grief, or leave loss behind. No loss is too big or too small to notice. There’s space for your hurt here. For grief support online, contact Luna Joy today.
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