What is grief?
What is grief? There are a number of helpful definitions out there for grief. For me, though, grief is a state of being you enter when you experience a soul-altering loss.
Psychology would probably want to replace the word “soul” here with something more medically grounded. But in my experience, and I suspect for many, the nature of what you experience in grief drives you into a realm beyond the rational and beyond the tangible and beyond the medical.
“Soul” is a word which sums up the totality of human life. It’s a word which attempts to convey the richness of human life, a richness which pushes past the merely physical and material. And sometimes, this richness is only fully appreciated in the despair generated by life lost.
Soul-altering loss?
What then constitutes a soul-altering loss? Well, put simply, it’s a loss of love. It’s a loss of something you have loved, and something you were loved by. It’s a loss of something you have given yourself to, entrusted yourself to, enmeshed yourself with and vice versa. It’s a loss of connection. And so it’s a loss of something which holds defining significance in your heart and mind.
When you lose a love like that you lose a part of yourself, a part of your identity, and a part of your very being. The loss doesn’t just impact you, it changes you, at the very core. It violates your humanity, and you can never be the same again. This was made clear to me three days after Susie’s death, when my 9 year old daughter, raw with emotion, said to me: “I don’t fell human Daddy”. They were hard words to hear, but they couldn’t have summed up my own feelings any more concisely or powerfully. No wonder people use words like “devastated”, “shattered”, “broken”, “destroyed” when they experience this sort of loss.
What this means, to put it in slightly different terms, is that loss becomes a part of us. Grief is the experience of gaining loss, acquiring loss, incorporating loss. And, sadly, there’s no way of losing that loss. It is with you forever. Grief doesn’t go away.
While this might all sound a little philosophical, and somewhat hopeless, there are a number of implications to this which I have found quite helpful as I try to come to terms with my own grief. That doesn’t mean I’ve found them easy to accept, and all of this is still very much a work in progress for me. But for whatever reason, I have found them helpful so far.
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First is recognising that grief is not something you get over or get through, but it is something you need to get used to. You don’t move on from it. you move along with it, carrying it with you through life. And that takes a lot of getting used to.
With that said, however, you can and do get through the moments you face along the way. I’ve found that some of those moments last a few minutes. Some of them can last up to a week. And it’s often the “first experiences” of things which are the most troublesome. But those moments pass, even if the grief does not. (I plan on writing an article about the firsts at some point).
It’s like those pictures you see of African women who carry water buckets on poles across their shoulders. It’s a burden. It requires balance. And if you try to walk through a doorway with that pole in place, you’re not going to fit through as you did before. You’re going to have to go through that door sideways, or find another way round.
In so many ways you have to re-learn life. You have to figure out how to negotiate all sorts of situations with those water buckets strapped to you, all the time. Things you previously took for granted, and could do automatically, now require conscious attention. This inevitably leads to awkwardness, frustration, despondency, irritation, and feeling like your a child again. But I’ve also noticed that when you learn a new pattern or discover a creative way to navigate something, feelings of accomplishment and the adjustment of habits can provide a certain level of satisfaction, and dare I say, hope.
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Secondly, because grief is now part of you, attached to you, it is not something that either you or others can solve. Grief is a state of being; it is not a problem which can be solved by human hands or by human process.
And this is comforting in a roundabout sort of way. As an engineer, I like the idea of being able to pump something into one end of a system and see it come out the other side transformed, renewed, fixed. Submitting something to a process where the output is predictable is usually a comfort.
But grief doesn’t work that way. And if your expectation is that it will progress in a linear fashion then you will feel disappointed, and perhaps even begin to despair at your lack of apparent progress. My experience of grief so far has shown me that it is largely chaotic and unpredictable and tremendously non-linear. You can have a string of good days and then be hit with a terrible day, where despair kicks in again.
Even more disconcerting, especially early on, is when you’re hit with a good day (or even a brief happy moment) in the midst of many bad ones. I had a few of these early on, and felt guilty, because out of honour for my wife and my love for her I didn’t think being happy was at all appropriate. Did I not love my wife enough to be perpetually sad? I’ll speak more about this below.
Recognising the non-linear nature of grief and it’s unpredictability has been a relief, because it has helped me to realise that I am not abnormal. The rocky road, the turbulent seas, the roller-coaster ride: there’s a reason for these metaphors for grief. I’m not going crazy.
Additionally, it’s liberated me from thinking I should or should not be at a certain point in my “healing”. I don’t need to feel the pressure of expectation which comes from a linear model of grief.
Finally, It’s also allowed me to be open to happiness when I’ve felt I should be sad, and sadness when I’ve felt I should be happy. In short, I’ve got permission to “ride the wave where it takes me.”
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Thridly, because grief derives from love, I’ve come to view the sadness of my grief as an expression of my ongoing love for Susie. So, in a strange way (at this present moment at least) I’m quite happy being sad.
Four months ago, I was able to express my love for Suse in a variety of ways. I could write her a card; I could give her a kiss; I could tell her I loved her; I could make her a cup of tea. I could talk with her and confide in her. I can’t do those things any more. I wish I could, but I can’t. But I can cry. And at times it feels like tears are the only genuine expression of love I have at my disposal.
This gives a purpose to my sadness. It’s not merely a response to the event of her death (though it certainly is that); it’s also a step into this new future without her. As an expression of my love for her, my sadness helps me to carve out a new way of relating to Susie. This notion of finding a new way to relate her I’m going to think on some more in subsequent posts.
From a pastoral care point of view, this means that (presently) any notion of me not being sad, even in the distant future, is quite unsettling. “It’ll get better; happiness will return”. As true as that may be, (and I appreicate the sentiment behind such statements), it actually doesn’t bring me comfort. Why? Because I equate the thought of not being sad with not loving her. And that’s a thought I cannot bear. The loss that’s attached itself to me, is the loss of her. And so she is a part of me in her absence. I will have a connection with her forever. And it will be one that always brings with it a sadness.
The key to dealing with this is to recognise that emotions can co-exist. You can be sad and happy simultaneously. Sometimes the expression of one will over rule the other. But it’s helpful to know that the two emotions are not mutually exclusive at any particular moment. Sadness can be an ever present reality; but happiness can sit on top of it.
