Thoughts on Grief and the Grieving Process

There are as many ways to grieve as there are people grieving. There are as many things to grieve as there are people grieving. On occasion I think my grief will overtake me. Sometimes I wish it would. Other times I wish I would stop feeling it altogether.

I’m at the point in the process where I’m surprised when grief shows up. Just all of a sudden I’ll feel sad, or tears will start to trickle down my face; often they pour down my face. There doesn’t seem to be any reason.

It’s usually really random stuff that will bring the grief out: watching a television show, hearing a song, or a flower blooming in a field. None of them had any history or particular meaning to me.

I lost my mother a little over three years ago. She’d been living with me, and died on Christmas morning. I don’t “celebrate” Christmas anymore.

Four months ago I lost a friend, and then less than two weeks later I lost another. Both were unexpected.

Losing my mom devastated me. We’d grown pretty close while she lived with me, so there’s that. But for the last year of her life, I’d been at home with her full-time. I quit my job and devoted myself to her. For the first time in my life I knew, without reservation, what I was on the planet to do, what my purpose was: to make her last years as happy as possible; to let her know that she was loved.

When she died, I not only lost her, I lost my meaning and purpose.

I moved forward with life, and got a job, as one has to do, because I was still alive, and grieving isn’t an excuse to give up and do nothing. I went to work every day and made friends.

Both of the people I lost four months ago were from that workplace, and I’m now unemployed.

Right now I’m not even sure who I’m grieving. Or what I’m grieving, because not all loss is to death: if it’s not a person, maybe it’s my feeling of having a purpose in life, the loss of Christmas, which I used to enjoy so much, and is now the anniversary of one of the worst days of my life, or the recent loss of my job. Maybe it’s all of these things.

In the last few years, I’ve read a couple books on grief. A Grief Observed by C.S. Lewis was the first. It was short, but much of what he wrote was exactly what I was feeling, but couldn’t put words to.

“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness…”

“And grief still feels like fear. Perhaps, more strictly, like suspense. Or like waiting; just hanging about waiting for something to happen. It gives life a permanently provisional feeling. It doesn’t seem worth starting anything. I can’t settle down. I yawn, I fidget, I smoke too much. Up till this I always had too little time. Now there is nothing but time. Almost pure time, empty successiveness.”

I also read The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion. In it, Didion says that after the death of her husband, she didn’t want to write an obituary for him, because that would make it real, because you don’t write obituaries for people who are alive.

It made me think about my opposite reaction after losing my mom: I read her obituary (that I wrote) time after time after time, trying to make it real.

Most recently, I’ve repeatedly searched the Internet for obituaries of the two friends I lost, even though I haven’t found them (there likely aren’t any), and after this amount of time it’s unlikely one will appear. And yet I search.

I’m doing my own magical thinking.

A couple days ago I started reading a book called Out of the Canyon – A True Story of Loss and Love, by Art & Allison Daily. I’m not done yet, but have already marked a couple passages that spoke to me. In this one the authors quote Mark Helprin:

“You learn…that love can overcome death, and that what is required of you in this is memory and devotion…To keep your love alive you must be willing to be obstinate, and irrational, and true… Without this, you will live like a beast and have nothing but an aching heart.”

Art Daily meets with Ram Dass, who tells him this:

“…faith and love are stronger than death and that death is not what it appears.”

These words I’ve written are how I feel today. Tomorrow I could read them and think “what a bunch of crap!” That’s my experience of grief. It’s never the same.

There’s no right or wrong way to do grief. There’s no time frame for grief. There are as many ways to grieve and as many things to grieve as there are people grieving,

This is how I deal with my grief.

This article is dedicated to AC, JC, and GS.

A Grief Observed, by C.S. Lewis, Kindle edition, published January 16, 2015, originally published 1961.

The Year of Magical Thinking, by Joan Didion, Kindle edition, published February 13, 2007, originally published 2005.

Out of the Canyon, A True Story of Loss and Love, by Art & Allison Daily, Harmony Books, 2009.