What You May Not Know About Grief (Part I)

This beautiful article has been written by someone who chooses to remain anonymous. It gives a fresh perspective on grief that comes with the loss of a loved one.

Here’s the thing about grief, it’s different, each and every time. We try our best to comfort our understanding of it with things like “the five stages of grief” but at the end of the day, no matter how much theory you may have behind it, there’s no blueprint to how you deal with it, there just isn’t, and not many people tell you that. I’ve had the misfortune of losing different people, including both my parents at different stages of my life. The biggest problem I faced initially was that I hadn’t realized that I was grieving the wrong way, that a storm was silently brewing within me, a storm filled with unhealthy emotions and releases, ready to explode as soon as I had reached my saturation point. It inevitably lead me down a dark path but that path allowed me to search the issue of grief and how best to deal with it. It allowed me to look at what helps and what doesn’t and with all my initial thoughts on it and all the clichés that people had often said to me over the years, I came to understand that, in my experience, there’s a lot that no one tells you about it. There’s a lot that some people assume, a lot that others sometimes wrongly regard as common practice or effect, a lot that others really don’t know and, in one way or another, can’t know and most importantly, there’s so much that YOU the griever may not know too. So here’s a few things that perhaps no one will tell you or has ever told you(as someone grieving or working with someone that is grieving). 

Disclaimer! You may know them already or not find them valid/helpful. Grief is not a one size fits all, experiences are different.

1. At some point, more often than not, you’re not haunted by the memory of your loved one but by the guilt of feeling as though you are actually forgetting them. Their voice, their laugh, their actual prominent thought in your mind. A couple of memorial days down the line you start to forget the date or miss their birthday and all of a sudden you feel terrible because you feel as though you’re losing them all over again, only in your mind this time. You are caught between either being too emotionally invested in their death or feeling too guilty that you’re not thinking about them enough.
2. It is not encouraging to hear that the people you’ve lost are proud of you. Not because of any other reasons but that there’s absolutely no way of knowing that, nor is there a biblical inclination towards such things being possible or true. Caught in the mix of those two issues is the prison you build yourself as you constantly try to make them proud without actually knowing what that looks like and so you attribute it to things like success and status. Which is wrong.
3. No one else understands what you specifically are going through, that’s okay. But the problem lies in telling yourself that, because you build walls around yourself telling yourself that no one will ever understand you and throw yourself all kinds of pity parties. Just because no one can fully understand it all does not mean that they cannot help you or that they cannot even partially empathize or sympathize. Fact is that is enough if you let it be and sometimes you miss the great encouragement you could possibly get from others simply because we rule them out on the basis of them not knowing or experiencing exactly what you do/have.
4. Without knowing it you will probably align your grief with release. That release will often present itself as a vice but the tricky part is recognizing that vice. Particularly because we only think of vices in relation to drink and drugs and sex, yet we miss simple things like emotionally damaging relationships, “over-venting”, anger, entitlement, superiority and inferiority complexes, sadness and the feeding of it, extreme activities, success, status and an entire inexhaustible list.
5. Probably the most important one that people either don’t say or do say but just say without actually thinking about, there’s peace and there’s healing. The reasons I say that most people don’t actually and properly think about them are; they don’t know what that peace looks like or where it’s found, and sometimes when they do, they don’t know what that means exactly in regard to healing or how it can be attained or even when! I’m not sure what your grieving process has looked like for you, as I said before it looks different for everyone. However, this peace comes from one place and I’ll tell you more about it in part 2!