Grief, My friend

This one went into the Jonesboro Sun Saturday

Grief, My Friend

When someone you really love dies, everything changes. Grief visits without invitation and often appears like it wants to overextend its stay. People respond to this kind of loss in many ways, some healthy and some not so healthy. Let’s take a little walk into grief and see what we can find here.

Now, I know that most people reading today are not experiencing significant grief right now. That’s fine. Use today’s column as preparation for when it does pay you a visit. For those of us who are in the throes of grief, let’s work through this thing together.

When the loss of a loved one imposes itself upon you, there is often an initial sense of surreality – I don’t believe it and I can’t deny it. Incompatible feelings crammed into one heart makes one weary, confused, and even angry. Sometimes people choose not to believe that person is really gone, but reality eventually has a way of drawing us back to the facts.

There is a physical sense to grief and it is usually experienced in the chest and gut. It feels like someone reached inside your chest and pulled out almost everything that was in there. There can be physical fatigue and weariness. The need for sleep is increased, but the ability to sleep is often decreased. Appetite abandons you for a while, but there is no less need to eat. There is this pressing sense that something needs to be done, but everything you do fails to satisfy that need.

Then there are the emotional aspects of grief. Besides the wide variety and intensities of feelings that pass in and out of the heart, there is the overwhelming sense that this situation is far too big to handle. Powerlessness can cripple the heart’s hopes that perhaps this was all a terrible, awful dream. Fear sets in because there is nothing that can be done about this gaping hole in your life. Sadness floods over fear because the one thing you want is the one thing unavailable to you – the person who has passed.

On and off, as time goes by, there are moments when the feelings of immense emptiness are held at bay. However, when you catch a certain smell in the air, or when passing by that old house, or perhaps ordering pizza from THAT pizza place happens, grief bursts in out of nowhere. You might even think you’re going crazy because it’s no big deal, right? It’s just a smell.

But the way of grief is not only found in the large, gaping hole in your heart, it is also found in the million little holes that dot the rest of your life – those unexpected yet intense memories associated with the flow of your regular life. So, not only is grief overwhelming for its hugeness, it is also overwhelming for its smallness. Even when the huge hole is reduced or you learn how to live with it, there are all the little holes that surprise you.

There is good news, however. The good news is that although grief seems to enter your life as an enemy, the longer it hangs around, the more you realize it as a friend. Grief changes over time from being only sadness, confusion, and anger to positive memories, meaningful moments, and respect for the one who passed on. The longer into healthy grieving a person goes, the more that grief is depended upon to reorient the heart and mind to where it needs to be, respect and love for the one who is gone. The grief of the living, over time, is the best thing for preserving the memory of the dead.