Welcome to Grief
“Grief is like the ocean; it comes in waves, ebbing and flowing. Sometimes the water is calm, and sometimes it is overwhelming. All we can [do] is learn to swim.” - Vicki Harrison
I have noticed that grief happens when we least expect it. It happens when everything is going so well for us. I have noticed that grief is necessary. I have noticed in the last few weeks that perseverance became the easiest coping mechanism for me. Instead of relying on others in our weaknesses, we cover our weakness in other ways. This is not how it is meant to be. I have treated this post much like my life. I have prolonged it. Is this really necessary? Do people really need to read another post on what grieving looks like? Honestly, they may not. But I need it. I need to know that grieving is okay. I need to know that I am not meant to live in my weakness alone.
I always imagined grief to be about loss, the tragedy of losing someone through death. Or it could occur through the transition from health to sickness. But I've come to realize that grief is a reality that happens in many different ways. The reality is that grief can happen in many different areas of our life. I've actually experienced this first-hand in more ways than I imagined.
Grief has taken multiple forms and I have not been able to understand it. Grief looked like surrendering a relationship. Grief looked like saying goodbye to someone who left too soon. Grief looks like caring for your mom from afar as she experiences a difficult physical condition. And grief looks like entering into transition, a transition that I thought would be so easy. Grief takes many forms. There is no right way to grieve and no time constraint on it.I wrote a book about disappointment, lament, and grief. Grief was a significant part of my journey. It was so significant that I gave it an entire chapter. My best friend actually read this chapter while living through her own grieving process. And you know what she did? She sent me the quotes that spoke to her the most during that journey. Then as I entered a place of unexpected grief, you know what happened? She sent me those very same quotes again. This time, I read those words differently. This time, those words were speaking directly to my broken heart. This time, I had to admit that those were some really good words.
Chapter Five: The Rise of Grief
We have reached one of the less favorable parts of this journey. I so terribly wished I could skip passed this chapter. It wasn’t fun to live through, and I realize it is not going to be fun to walk through again. Honestly, I first wrote this chapter as I was experiencing it. This is probably why I am not a fan of it today. I know exactly what I was feeling and where I was when I wrote it down.I was in a coffee shop, eating a blueberry muffin, writing down every feeling I held about grief. What a joyous time!I kept thinking, Can we just not talk about this? As I pondered all of this, I was listening to a podcast with Lysa Terkeurst. She talked about the book she had just written about pain, trust, and disappointment. Pain is overwhelming. She described how it feels a lot easier to keep our pain at bay. It makes more sense to us to sugar coat the pain we feel because no one actually wants to hear what pain says. She says something like this, “Sometimes you can look back and you paint it [pain] in a prettier picture than what it actually was. I wanted it to be as messy and honest as it could be. I wanted people to see this is life and this is what it means to do life in this way.”I have felt this more and more. I believed that I needed to paint a picture of pain even if it isn’t the real thing. The Lord was showing me what it looked like to be real and to write pain even if it isn’t the most beautiful picture. It may not be what people want to hear, but at least I am being honest about how messy life can actually be. Because the truth is that pain is not always the most beautiful thing. Grief is a gruesome process.
Rising Grief
It was like a huge rushing wind blew toward me. It seemed like I was being hit with a fresh flow of water, but it tasted very bitter. I tasted the bitterness of grief. It was bitter to me because I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t want to cry, and I really didn’t want to enter into a place of grief. When healing comes, your reaction is supposed to be satisfaction. I was determined to be happy. Maybe, you are already familiar with this. But, no matter how hard you try, it is impossible to tell yourself to be happy. Sometimes, something deep within you feels differently from the thoughts in your head. I could declare over and over again that I was fine. But, unfortunately, this declaration would not replace the status of my current feelings. I wasn’t fine. Honestly, the line between fine and not okay was not even visible to me at this time.Grief is not always something we pursue. It is something that we try to avoid. Yet, grief is central to our healing. Grief leads us to wholeness. If we deny the grief its place, then we will be denying ourselves true restoration. I knew that relearning how to live without a chronic illness would be different. However, I did not consider how difficult it would be. It seems strange to think about grieving for a chronic illness. But, people become tightly integrated with illness. It is not unusual to go through a grieving process. It is important to rethink one's individual life. Grieving is a part of acceptance. We grieve in the very same way when we lose someone through a break-up, divorce, or through a tragic death. It is important to go through the process of grief.I went through a wide range of emotions. I would range from disappointment to uncontrollable tears to joy. None of the emotions ever made sense to me. I thought that freedom would be happiness all the time. I thought I would be instilled with an enthusiastic spirit. But this didn't happen. Was I distrusting God?What if grief was meant to be the main emotion? What if this emotion is more positive than we imagine? What if it was more important than happiness? Yes, we are sad and that is not fun. Sadness follows something that was good. This means that the preceding phase was good. This means there was love in that previous relationship. There was joy in that previous season, and there will be joy in the next season. It may just take some time of walking through the thick pathway of grief.
"Grief I've learned, is really just love. It's all the love you want to give but cannot. All of the unspent love gathers up in the corners of your eyes, the lump in your throat and in that hollow part of your chest. Grief is just love with no place to go."
- Jamie Anderson
See the Grief
It is essential for growth to learn to walk into grief. It is important to cry over the loss. As it falls away, we are able to move into a new phase. We are able to grow in a new season. There are now no distractions and everything is set in motion to participate in the new phase. When this phase begins to appear into your life, please do not ignore it. I tried ignoring this part of my journey. Whenever I started to cry, I physically reminded myself that it was useless to cry. I was humiliated over my emotions because I could not see the logic behind them. Sometimes you cannot explain why you feel the way that you do.
Feel the Grief
Seeing the grief walked me into feeling it. Our emotions fight with each other. They fight for a way out. Sometimes the only way can occur through the process of lamenting. To lament is defined as "to express sorrow, mourning or regret for often demonstrably." God led me into lamenting. He led me to give to him everything I felt and didn’t feel. For He wanted to help aid me in understanding what I was going through. So, I learned to lament. It was a scary place to be in. Lament is healthy. Lament is good. But, sometimes that process can feel rather scary. We have become people who are quite good at practicing the “faking fine principle.” Are you familiar with this principle? We pretend that everything is going well in our lives although it is not at all what we are feeling within our hearts. It is time to take a reality check and stop pretending. I think that I could normalize things and make everything feel good enough, but that really would be far from the genuine emotion. I did this in a moment of grief two years ago. And I have been doing this once again through the grieving process of transition. One busy Tuesday morning, my resident, roommate, and my best best friend moved away. She really is not moving that far away. And I know that she will always be apart of my life because I don't know what I would do without her. She is kind of my person. But the doubts still come to mind. Fear really grips my heart. Transition might be mostly for her, but I also have to learn to navigate day to day life without seeing her for coffee, lunch, and dinner (we like food lol). C.S. Lewis quotes, "No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear." Four days after she left, grief crept in quite strongly. Grief welled up in my eyes this past weekend in unexpected moments. Grief feels a lot like fear. It is all of the fears about the past, present, and future bound up in one moment of time. I'm afraid to let go. I'm afraid I'll forget or be forgotten. I'm afraid of the past and the new beginnings. I'm afraid to cry and to sit in vulnerability with anyone but myself. This is grief, and this is okay.
Walk in Grief
The Lord leads us to walk in grief. This is a gift from God because God meets us in the valley as we revitalize our connection to Him. The Lord was showing me that I may sit with this right now and face it, but he wants me to know that I will get up and rise into a beautifully new season. It may not be today, but the Lord is walking with us in this process.
"The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not 'get over' the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same. Nor would you want to." - Elizabeth Kubler-Ross and David Kessler On Grief and Grieving
This is what it means to live life like this. Unexpected pain will trickle into our lives. Because of such things, the Lord, our good and loving father, walks us into grief. This grief is about lamenting, literally wailing our cries loudly to the Lord, knowing He desires to be with us in such pain. There is no doubt that the Lord has felt this surreal pain. He is not foreign to our pain.This grief will always be with us. There is no timeline with it or special blueprint. There is no designated end to our grief. There are no rules to grief and for that we need to be grateful. It is a process and a walk for a reason. We must acknowledge that. We must accept that.The grief you feel today will be different from tomorrow, but it will never fully leave you. "Grief is like living two lives. one is where you 'pretend' everything is alright, and the other is where your heart silently screams in pain." Grief feels like a walk alone attempting to process all that has happened. But it definitely doesn't need to be like this. What does it look like to invite others along that process? Some consider it to be a lonely process, but it can be an authentic process as well, with the right community of people. Grieve the losses and the anger and learn to lean into the people who know you the best. Lucky for me, I have a best friend who knows me the best. I feel greatly blessed to have a person who doesn't just know me, but who is also walking the same grieving pathway as me. Remember, grieving is okay. It is a small bump on the road to your new season.
Grieving is a part of your healing process. But it is not up to you to fix it or endure it alone. The Lord is your help. He bends down to listen to you, so cry out to the Lord. But, do not wrestle in the hard stuff alone. Find someone to grieve with you. Find a friend who will be a mess with you. We are not meant to carry our burdens or our messes alone. We are called to walk together in the joyful moments and to wrestle together in the tough moments.
- Lexie Mahaffey, Hope Beyond Disappointment