Welcome to Grief Day by Day.
While I want to welcome you, I also understand that you are hurting. I know you would rather not be in grief. Yet I’m glad you’re here—because even in your time of darkness, I have hopeful news and helpful ideas to share.
I’ve been a grief counselor for a long time now—more than forty years, in fact—and I’ve written a number of what I hope are compassionate books on healing in grief. But in this little book, for the first time, I’ll be spotlighting a secret of sorts. It’s a revelation that will help you feel better right now—as well as live better in the months and years to come.
But before I unveil the secret, let’s review a few important foundational principles that will help prepare you for our discussion to come.
1. First, grief, which is our internal experience of loss, is normal and necessary. Grief is what we think and feel on the inside after someone we love dies or we lose something important to us. For the most part, grief happens automatically because it’s a form of love. Grief is love’s conjoined twin; we don’t get one without the other. And because love is what gives our lives meaning, we must also embrace and express our natural grief.
2. Second, mourning, which is the outward expression of our grief, is what helps our grief heal. When we talk about our thoughts and feelings—or journal them or paint them or cry them out or any number of other mourning activities and behaviors—we’re moving them from the inside to the outside, and in doing so, we’re giving them motion. Emotions in motion are able to flow with our ongoing lives. Emotions in motion help our grief start to soften and heal.
3. And third, our grief affects us not only emotionally but also physically, cognitively, socially, and spiritually. Our grief permeates all facets of our selves, so when we do our work of mourning, it’s essential that we find ways to mourn that give voice to all of these different parts of who we are. The spiritual realm is particularly important.
In my writings and presentations, I often talk about grief as a journey. It’s a difficult, painful trek, and one that has no timetable and no final destination, because grief never totally ends. Instead, as we mourn and give our grief motion, bit by bit, over time, we learn to accommodate it as part of who we are. We integrate it into our lives. When it is fully integrated, we find that we are reconciled to it. It is an inextricable, ever-present part of who we are, yet we also find that we are invested in continuing our lives forward with meaning and purpose.
In the wilderness of grief, most of us meander back and forth, around and around. We’re a bit lost, and we’re wandering. That’s a natural and fine way to go because grief, like love, is mysterious and not entirely understandable. It’s also recursive. That means it loops and doubles back on itself. We may find ourselves recovering the same ground, sometimes over and over and over again. Still, as long as we’re embracing and expressing our authentic, unique grief, we’re moving…and ever so slowly, we are healing.
Picture if you will the bird’s-eye view of the circuitous paths we often find ourselves on in grief. They look something like this:
But!
But what if instead of wandering aimlessly in the wilderness of our grief, we could move as the crow flies? What if there were a more direct, really effective, supercharged route to healing in grief?