I am writing as a participant in grief. My husband died of cancer at age 52. My heart was crushed when my newborn brother died when I was thirteen. I have participated in grief with my own personal losses, losses experienced by other family members, and losses experienced by friends. I shared losses with families I was privileged to get to know through my time working in hospice.
There are official, published definitions of grief that include:
- Grief is a normal and natural reaction to the death of a loved one.
- Anticipatory grief takes place when family members, friends, or significant others are grieving due to the impending death of a relative or a person close to them.
- Bereavement is the objective situation of being deprived of someone significant by death.
However, I don’t want to be clinical. This is to think about “what do we do” in grief. It is not a question of “if” something will happen in our lives to cause us grief, but, rather, “when” will it happen.
It has been said that “mourning is not an end, but a beginning.” Perhaps it would be better to say we struggle to become more accepting of the loss rather than to have the loss be resolved. There is a difference between the two. We struggle to learn how to live with the loss, not totally move beyond it so that it is no longer a part of our lives. The mourning process is never totally completed, and those who think you should just get over grief are trying hard to get life together again, to be normal again.
At times, the idea is presented that the resolving of grief and pain can be hastened with a series of completed tasks or steps. It is the idea that grief puts our life out of balance for a measured time, but that we should be able to get that lost balance back. A person may be given plans and helpful hints for recognizing grief, accepting it, and moving on. Our culture believes that the faster this happens, the better it is for all concerned. Someone may be encouraged to work on getting the grieving done. We, ourselves, may want to be able to be finished with our own grief so that we won’t keep suffering. The problem is that it doesn’t work that way.
Grieving for a loved one doesn’t necessarily reflect the age of the person who died, the illness suffered, or the years of debility. I observed deep grieving of hospice families who lost an elderly parent. We may not understand the sense of loss experienced by older, adult children when their aging, sick parent dies. Sometimes we are surprised at the grief a wife or husband may have for their spouse who had dementia and hadn’t know them for months or years.
We also can’t determine how much or how little a person is grieving based on outward exhibitions of grief. Someone may not cry outwardly but still be greatly affected by the loss. Or, when you see someone immediately after or soon after a loss, that person may be going on adrenaline that helps get through the first days of death and the funeral. We may be quick to assume the person is doing well or isn’t grieving much. We can’t see what’s inside.
We don’t know how we are going to react when it happens to us either. We may be surprised by our own extreme, immediate grief, or we may be surprised at our seeming lack of extreme grief. All grief is different. There is no standard, acceptable way to grieve. It is a process, a journey. We often don’t know where we are going or how we will get there.
A friend lost a baby with Down’s Syndrome due to heart complications when she was about ten months old. About a week after the funeral, my friend commented to me that she was so relieved because her grief had been minimal at the point. She really felt that God was giving her the strength to accept it. I cautioned her that, most likely, grief would come and she needed to be prepared. She shouldn’t chastise herself when it did. Several months later, she thanked me for those words because grief had come and when it did, it was heartbreaking. It helped her to know that her grief was normal. She hadn’t abandoned God and God hadn’t abandoned her.
Another family member experienced the unthinkable loss of her only two sons when the motorcycle they were riding together was hit by a car drag racing down a rural highway. Later, she shared with me how her grief was compounded when her pastor’s wife told her that if she lost her children, she wouldn’t mourn because she would know her children would be heaven. Her children were alive. She didn’t know.
Death is life’s biggest question. There are no quick answers, no easy formulas, no way out. We must walk through it and, somehow, live with it. Grieving doesn’t mean that we will never have some joy or happiness again. Those can come. But, we will always be different because of the experience.
