“Grief can surge back like a rogue wave, even when the person looks just fine on the outside.”
—Kelly Buckley
Change is in the air. My kids are out of the house now and on their own way. Everywhere I look, I see and feel change. And change often involves grief.
Grief. That five-letter word.
You can grieve the death of a loved one. A friendship may be lost, and you grieve. You lose a job, and you grieve. A relationship breaks up, a child leaves home—it’s all loss, it’s all change, it can all trigger grief. And how do you deal with it? There’s no one right way to grieve, and it’s important to know that your way is okay.
Why? Because grief is something we all experience, but don’t always discuss. It comes at you at different times in all kinds of ways. Millions go through this every day—often away from solace, sensitivity, or support.
I know grief in its many forms. Not just following the deaths of family members and friends, but also in the feelings of loss that come with the inevitable life changes we all endure. In my struggle to sort through the sweeping mix of emotions that come with grief, I’ve found myself endlessly grateful for the amount of thinking Elisabeth Kübler-Ross put into the subject.
That’s because I grew up in a family that experienced lots of tragedy and loss, but no one ever discussed it. They just put their heads down and powered on through. So as a child, and then later on, I moved through these terrible experiences pretty much alone, trying to make sense of the losses without any guidance or framework for how to understand them. Decades later, I realized I was still trying to process what had happened, and I thought to myself that there must be a better way.
Then when my grandmother died, my kids had so many questions. Their questions made me realize that I was just as childlike in my understanding of grief as they were. So I felt a need to address the curiosity we all have about loss in its many forms, including grieving a pet. Thus was born my children’s book about grief, What’s Heaven? People thought this book wouldn’t sell, and then it went on to tremendous success—proving just how thirsty our culture is for the conversation about loss and how we cope with it.
Then years later, my mother died. I had always been terrified that if anything ever happened to her, I would never be able to survive. When she passed, I experienced the true depths of grief. But unlike what I saw my relatives do when I was growing up—heads down, powering on through—I now actually felt this tremendous loss, and it brought me to my knees. Then two weeks later, my uncle died—and a year and a half after that, my father died, and my marriage ended. So for several years, I was marinating in grief, and it was an incredibly lonely experience. My world stopped, while everything else continued swirling around me. I felt isolated in my grief.
I found comfort in others who had experienced the death of a loved one or multiple deaths. Each time I came across someone else’s story of grief, I felt a little less alone. Every time I wrote about it, I felt I’d taken a step forward. Whenever I shared my feelings of grief with someone else, I felt less isolated. And every time I read about someone else’s experiences overcoming grief, I got inspired to believe that I, too, would overcome it one day.
But I also know that some people never get over the loss of a loved one. They just manage their way through it. Even to this day, I can find myself suddenly surprised by tears of grief for an old loss. But I now have the awareness of what it is and the knowledge that I can get through it again. And I do.
Being able to experience grief has made me brave. In opening up to it and allowing myself to really feel it, I grew stronger. But in order to do that, I needed to hear the message that it’s okay and, in fact, crucial to feel your grief.
Grieving is real, it’s an unavoidable part of the human condition, and we don’t need to suppress it in order to survive it.
Dear God, I trust you to help me face the unpredictable challenges and storms in my life. I choose to put my eyes on you and remember that you have promised to be with me, no matter what. I know that courage doesn’t come just from confidence in my own strength, but from confidence in you. Thank you for the courage to face whatever lies ahead. Amen.