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The Right Way to Grieve

When you lose someone you love, good people do what good people do—they try and help.

They see you in the deepest despair and they want desperately to pull you out, to rescue you, to stop the bleeding. There’s a helplessness that comes watching someone they care for suffer, and in their urgency to alleviate that suffering, they will do something that is rarely helpful: they will use words.

They will speak the simple platitudes they have heard others speak to those who grieve. 
They will attempt to neatly wrap up the existential questions that death brings so that it all make sense.
They will try and comfort you with thoughts of better places and gained angels. 
They will offer you advice on how to grieve and hopefully helpful corrections when you’re doing it wrong. 

Having walked the Grief Valley after my father’s sudden passing three years ago, I learned how little value words actually held, how little they helped, how hopelessly brittle and fragile they were beneath the crushing weight of a sorrow that words will never properly contain. 

And so the irony of me offering you any words right now at all is not lost on me, but here they are:

You’re grieving the right way.

Wherever you are in your journey, however horribly you believe you’re handling it, however badly you believe you’re responding—you’re doing exactly what you should be doing, so give yourself grace.

The greatest tragedy right now would be for you to try and carry everything you’re carrying and to pile upon it all, any guilt for the way you’re mourning or the time it’s taking or the progress you think you aren’t making. It’s enough of a burden to bear your loss without judging your performance. 

There are millions of people far wiser and far more educated in these matters than I am, and they will give you strategies and plans and schedules, and objectively describe the process of grieving, and though you may find some solace or encouragement or understanding in these things, they too will fall short.

Because only you are you, and only you have lost the one you’ve lost. The singularity of that relationship means that your specific grief is unprecedented. It has never existed in the history of the planet. It will not look or feel like any grief before it and it will not behave according to plan or on any schedule:

You will have it all together, and then it will all hit the fan.
You will think that you’re well healed, and without warning the wounds will reopen.
You’ll feel as though you’ve reached a stable clearing, and the ground will give way.
You’ll feel quite able and strong, and then you’ll get sucker punched and collapse to the ground.

And this is all okay. It is normal. It really is. You’re not losing your mind, you’re just holding your sorrow.

Yes, there are responses to losing people we love that are not particularly healthy that we try to avoid. There are coping mechanisms that we can utilize that can help, and leaning on others can surely lighten the load to a point.

But the bottom line, is that grief just sucks.

There are no magic words to fix this.
There is no shelf life to loss. 
There are some questions that will remain unanswered in this life.
There is occasional Hell you’re just going to have to walk through and this is all okay.

You’re going to break down and freak out and fall apart, and it’s going to happen over and over and over. So break down and freak out and fall apart, and when you can, get up and keep going.

But friend, refuse to carry any guilt right now. However you are grieving in this moment, it is the right way—because it is the only way that you can grieve.

Be encouraged.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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