Grief as VIP
We all know this common image of grief: the black-veiled widow suffering months or years of woeful depression until she can “move on” and love again. The message is: when you’re grieving, you’re sad, and when you’re not sad anymore, you’re done grieving.
So it can be quite a surprise to feel emotions that aren’t anything like sadness during grief, things like relief, excitement, even joy. We might even feel guilty about having not-sad feelings, as though it’s a betrayal of some kind.
But grief is much more than sadness. Let’s help Grief break out of the usual dreary image, adorn it with fitting color, and elevate its status to VIP (Very Important Process). Because:
Grief is the process of metabolizing the impact of an entire relationship on you— and it is every bit as complex and textured as the relationship itself was.
You’ll need more than just sadness to process:
Every wonderful experience you’ve ever had, or wish you could have had, with or about a person who has passed.
Every difficult experience you’ve ever had with or about that person.
Feelings about unfinished issues and future hopes.
Not to mention the counter emotions to everything listed above - your reaction to those things being gone. You must also process:
How you feel about losing the wonderful experiences — the phone calls you counted on, the dinners, the trips etc.
The very real emotions related to never having to experience unpleasantness with that person again. No more criticism, conflict, disagreements; no more hospital visits, laborious medical procedures, or whatever else wasn’t easy in that relationship.
The finality of: the earthbound story of this relationship is all told. There’s no alternate ending, and no new memories will be made.
This expands grief’s territory way beyond sadness into a 4-D technicolor kaleidoscope where any emotion goes.
Often during grief, we have tight rules about when our emotions are appropriate: they need to make sense, they need to be true, and they can’t hurt other people. We wonder, “What kind of a person would feel that way at a time like this?” or we think we are selfish for feeling angry or hateful toward someone who didn’t want to pass away. This judgment of ourself keeps us in inner conflict. Try as we might, we cannot choose which feelings come up and we can’t always explain why they’re there — but judging or arguing with them keeps us stuck.
Instead policing and managing, what this VIP needs is an all-access pass to your emotions so it serve its crucial purpose — to help you understand and accept that your reality has changed.
Grief needs permission to move in and out of emotions as needed, without permission, restriction or justification.
it may feel like a stretch to imagine surrendering to an emotional process you can’t control or explain, so please think of it as an intention, not necessarily a goal. Your grief will work with you wherever you are — it has to. It will process to the degree that you are capable of - maybe by filling your head up with fog sometimes while some sadness or dismay moves through. You might go numb for a little while when it’s been too much. You may find yourself landing in confusion or disorientation, followed by sudden rage or self-hatred. My wish for you is this: just allow. There is grace in this.
You get to feel it all because this is YOUR process. Yes, the other person died, but this loss happened to YOU. My wish for you is to embrace and cherish, or at the very least not reject or denigrate a process whose purpose is to bring about your healing.
Reach out if you want some support with this or you want to talk more.
