The Path Through Grief

            Taking the time to grieve is a concept I find somewhat confusing and somewhat simplistic. Someone might say "Have you taken the time to grieve?" or "Are you burying your grief?" The questions imply that one can turn grief off and on according to one's priorities. From my own experience, grief has a timeline that is unpredictable.

            If a person hides grief emotionally, it might be present physically, or even intellectually. I've known bereft people who speak of feeling nauseous and there is no physical diagnosis, grieving women who enter menopause or begin the symptoms of menopause at a very early age, or people who develop migraines immediately following a death. After the death of each of our sons, my attention span became very short, and often I couldn't complete a train of thought, particularly if it was important.

            Grief means tears, and it also might mean depression. Grief is work. More importantly, grief is life-changing, but it is not life-ending. It is an injury from which we must recover to the extent that most of the pain is gone. We will have adjusted our lives to any limitations grief might have caused. We will, thankfully, have an emotional scar to always remind us of what we have lost and what we have survived.

            Swallowed by a Snake by Tom Golden is a helpful guide to the manifestations of grief and the approaches to grief healing. In his book, Golden uses the folk tale of a man swallowed whole by a snake and that man's endeavors to escape. Golden refers to "the masculine side of grief" in the book, but does make it clear that women and men alike incorporate both masculine and feminine approaches to procedures, but perhaps to different degrees.

            The book makes it clear that we must work through grief actively. Allowing regret and sadness to control our inevitable passage through grief is not as likely to have the healthy result as working through the journey. The escape from the snake was accomplished by the swallowed man eating his way out. While that seems grotesque and of course difficult, so are some of the things we must do to escape debilitating and destructive clutches of bereavement. The escape from the snake was not immediate. It took a very long time. The passage through grief does not take a few weeks, it takes months, even years.
             Most importantly, the passage through grief doesn't end with a complete return to who and what you once were. It is merely a progression, often without completion. The result of the progression is that we are able to continue to live our lives.

            The work of grief varies from one part of the world to another. In at least one culture, loud wailing is a part of the grief journey. In some cultures, the spirit of the one who died wanders nearby for a year, during which time his family leave gifts of food and trinkets that the loved one might enjoy. In some cultures, the immediate burial of the body is important. 

            In our culture, grief is often solitary and generally dismissed as a few days of personal leave. We plan the funeral or memorial event, we choose a plot or an urn. We contact family and friends. We look through photos of past occasions and perhaps even select some for a video. We tell the story of our loved one's life, giving information for an obituary. We go through our loved one's possessions, putting some or all of them back where they were, placing others in a container for storage or donation. We plan the events of the first year or two (or three or four): Birthdays, holidays, memorial events, recognitions. We talk about our loss. We remember and remember and dream. In other words, we must do tasks related to the death in order to move through the grief.

            Those are merely the actions we do that other people observe. We must do more. We need to speak our loved one's name. we need to continue in our previous role for at least a little while. We need to do things to preserve our loved one's memory. We need to review our memories, contemplate our future without our loved one, and share our feelings with those close to us. Some people join a support group, some write a journal, others write and post pictures on social media, still others make scrapbooks or photo collections.

            Some grievers find specialized projects. A person handy with a sewing machine might choose to make a pillow or quilt out of articles of clothing of the loved one, other's might design a garden memorial. Whatever you do in remembering the person that died is a way of working through grief. Finally, grief counseling will help those who find the above attempts inadequate to a life without emotional pain.  

            At the end of the journey, the pain will be less and perhaps eventually alleviated. The memories and recollections of the person who died will continue to be vivid. More importantly, you will have the knowledge that your life can go on, you can be a contributor to the lives around you, and you will have survived the deep dark tunnel of despair.