We all have experienced grief and loss at one time or another. Truly, there is no one on earth who is untouched by death, loss, harm, and heartache. Life is messy; people are complicated; At times the world can feel broken and hard. The invitation to grief is near constant throughout our lifetime and yet many of us attempt to avoid it, deny it or minimize it.
Grief can feel all consuming; as if our grief will take us out we fear if we allow let it start we may never stop grieving. We can also feel afraid that we will not be comforted in our grief, a sense that one can understand or meet us in our pain, leaving us feeling isolated and alone.
The old cliché that “time heals all wounds” is an alluring illusion; We hope that grief is something that can be over and done, as if it was a check-list item that can be completed, crossed off and finished. And yet grief is more like a process that continues rather than an end point or destination. Grief is a normal and necessary emotional response to the experience of loss or heartache. It shows us that someone or something has really mattered to us. To grieve is to be human, affected by the people and world around us. We are meant to experience a full range of emotions, and this includes grief and sadness.
Understanding Grief: Carrying Love and Loss Together
While grief is too large a topic to cover in a short blog post, my hope is that this will be the beginning of a continuing conversation around it.
One way to think about grief is to think of grief as a backpack or bag that we carry with us on the journey of life. When we experience loss or heartache, this backpack feels heavy; we may feel uncomfortable and burdened by the extra weight and we want to take it off, to simply drop the bag and “move on” without it. We may feel that the backpack of grief is ill-fitted, unwelcome or unwanted, that life would be easier or better without it.
At yet, our grief is the evidence that someone or something mattered to us. It is the love that we carry in the absence of the person or thing that we’ve lost. And carry it, over time, can make us stronger, more empathetic, and more connected to ourselves and others.
Rabbi and grief educator/counselor, Earl A. Grollman, wrote in his book Living When A Loved One Has Died, that “Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness. It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity, the price your pay for love. The only cure to grief is to grieve.”
“Grief is not a disorder, a disease or a sign of weakness.
Rabbi Earl A. Grollman
It is an emotional, physical and spiritual necessity,
the price you pay for love. The only cure to grief is to grieve.”
Re-wiring the Brain: The Science Behind the Grieving Process
Grief isn’t bad, it’s actually generative. In fact, grief acts as a psychological bridge between the life you had and the life you have now. It helps us to understand our experience and helps us to move forward into a life marked with an absence.
Mary-Frances O’Connor, psychologist and professor of psychology at the University of Arizona, directs a Grief, Loss and Stress Lab where she’s studies the neurobiological science of grief. What she has found that is something happens in our brains when we grieve: our grief actually re-wires our neuro-pathways in our brains. In the case of the death of a loved one, this re-wiring helps us reconcile our memory (that is our internal virtual map) of our loved one with the reality of their absence. She suggests that grief in this way is form of learning as our brains makes sense of loss and heartache.
Grief Invites Us To Connection:
Expressing grief often signals a need for support and offers a way to strengthen our social bonds through vulnerability, connection and ritual (both individually and collectively). We are human; we have limits! Because we are made for and by connection, grief can be a reminder of our interconnectedness with the people and world around us. When your backpack of grief feels heavy, the weight an ever present reminder of love lost, there is an invitation for us to reach out and connect with others.
What does your grief backpack feel like today? Are you trying to drop it, or are you learning to walk with it?
If you’re looking for someone to journey with you in a season of grief, or you feel alone and need additional support, connect with one of our therapists for a free consultation.
Resources on Grief:
- The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss by Mary-Frances O’Connor
- As Long As You Need: Permission to Grieve by J.S. Park
- The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
- Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and the Heartbreaking Path of Grief by Joanne Cacciatore
- Living When A Loved One Dies by Earl Grollman
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