How to Grieve What Used to Be
How do you grieve?
Let’s back up. What do you know about grief? How is it different from sadness or depression?
We know they are look-a-likes. Both involve intense sadness and even despair. Grief, however, is the normal and appropriate response to a great loss, often the death of a loved one. Whereas grief and depression share several characteristics such as heightened emotions, fatigue, appetite disturbances, loss of pleasure, and inability to enjoy things, they are not the same. A big contrast is depression is usually marked by a tendency to isolate from others with little or no experience of pleasure.
The grieving person usually stays connected to others through the process and hopefully experiences pockets of joy or pleasure along the way. Something I learned from the grief guru himself, David Kessler, is that grief must be witnessed—loved one(s) hopefully walk alongside and see this pain integrating into our lives so we can process it better.
There’s also this thing called anticipatory grief: deep sadness for what will be lost. The fact that life will never fully go back to the way things were is what that tastes like. Just as air travel did after 9/11, this virus will mark history in an unprecedented way.
You may know there are five main stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, sadness, and acceptance. So here’s how those stages pertain to the pandemic that’s coursing through the unwilling veins of our world:
Denial: This won’t affect me.
Anger: I’m so pissed we didn’t act faster as a nation. And I hate staying at home all the time without work and independence!
Bargaining: If we wear a mask and keep our distance, this will all be over, yes?
Sadness: I feel helpless because there’s no real endpoint.
Acceptance: This is really happening and I can do my part to help out.
Grief is complex and not linear. For all you type A’s out there, beware of trying to grieve neatly. It won’t happen. It’s messy, cyclical, and much like whac-a-mole.
One day we can be fairly poised, the next mad as hell, and the next denying anything’s actually happening because the weather’s finally warm and sunny.
As you can imagine, the real power lies in the acceptance piece. When we are able to simply allow what’s coming up emotionally and let it move through us, we can access acceptance more quickly. After all, the word “emotion” is mostly comprised of the word “motion.” That said, we must allow emotions to come up and move through us as they are created in our bodies. If we don’t do this, we create bigger problems down the road.
So how do we grieve what used to be? The lovely life you’d grown accustomed to? The lifestyle and rituals you carved out over the years? How do you make sense of this new normal?
By assigning meaning to it.
We must appropriate purpose to our grief. Eventually, we must be the hero in our grief story as opposed to the victim.
David Kessler actually built out the grief process to include meaning as the sixth stage. How powerful is that?
Let your grief work for you and create deeper, richer meaning in your life right now. Your shock is appropriate, your tears are precious, your anger—valid. We are all on this spiritual journey together as we are becoming more real through our pain.
Love & Gratitude,
Katie
P.S. Need a safe space to process and grieve? I’d love to have you join my Online Support Group called Bloom. Click here for more info.