Honoring Grief

I met with my grief counselor yesterday for the last time. She is retiring next month and I have a toolbox full of goodies and insight to spirit me on my way. I've been seeing her regularly now for the last seven months after some prompting from a friend, when I realized that I really wasn't sure how to navigate the waters of grief after my father's suicide in October 2009.

Grief is a tricky thing and it can send you into a tailspin of raw experience, confusion and turbulent emotion. A grieving person has had their life forever altered. A loved one is gone, perhaps suddenly, perhaps after a long battle with an illness. In any case, it can be debilitating and there is no determined length for the adjustment process; it can take years, if not a lifetime to integrate the loss, to spin your way around the grief cycle.

Our culture and society do not seem to allow room for grievers or for grief even though grief is a process that is experienced within a social context. There are no requisite number of days to wear black. There isn't much time to process before returning to life as usual. Franklin Delano Roosevelt was the last American president to wear a black arm band when his mother Sara passed away. In our culture today, aside from the funeral, most rituals of wailing, head shaving, and wearing certain clothing are gone.

How on earth then, is anyone supposed to know that we might need more time? Extra care and support? Understanding and empathy?

A person with a cast on their arm has an obvious injury that society allows for, as a person in the hospital with an illness has a physical manifestation of the fact that she may need more support and care. It is not so with grief.

Grief can be lonely and silent. When the tidal waves of emotion wash over you, it can leave you feeling rudderless and crazy, uncertain and fragile. The waves can come out of nowhere at any time, they don't care about appropriateness or timing, they have their own schedule.

Grief is a sensitive time. I can liken it to being turned inside out, like a fish that has come up from the depths of the deepest darkest ocean, too far and too fast. Resisting the pull, the tearing, the scream, only serves to prolong the process and make it worse. Surrender is the only option.

I am here to tell you that despite the pulling, tearing and screaming, there is hope. There is hope and creativity and insight. Hope can be found in accepting the process, in seeking a solid support system, in honoring your grief; for it is yours and yours alone and it cannot belong to anyone else. In fact, an important factor in the resolution of grief is social support from others. The bereaved need support, not only for the reality of the loss, but for the validity of their grief, and of themselves as legitimate grievers.

So how can we honor our own grief you might ask? By expressing it and accepting it without fear. By learning to understand our own way of processing the grief. By rooting ourselves in things that nourish and comfort our wounded souls. By not being afraid to cry and wail and shake. Perhaps even by wearing a physical symbol of grief to let the world know that you are going through something critical, important, valuable and sacred that will ultimately change who you are as a person, if you will allow it.

We must embrace pain and burn it as fuel for our journey. ~Kenji Miyazawa