Experiencing Grief

by Rev. Jayne Hubbard

"Perhaps the most important truth I have learned is that healing of grief is heart based, not head-based." -Alan Wolfelt

If you have lived, then you have lost someone or something. If you have felt, then you have felt the pain and sorrow of grief. Hopefully most of us will have made it through childhood before we had some great tragedy. Sadly some of us did not. Those losses are especially difficult. Hopefully most of us will have had someone in our life who could weather the journey with us; sadly some of us will have gone it alone. Hopefully grief will not have overwhelmed us to the point of illness; sadly some of us will have succumbed to the despair both physically and mentally. Grief is a natural part of living. It is not meant to kill us although it may seem as if it is. It is meant to help us move towards healing and get on with our lives. Loss and the pain that comes with it are like the physical pain that lets us know we are hurting and need help. Grief can be understood, faced and lived with and through.

I have always felt that once you know something you cannot now know it. Grief is the same. Once you have experienced a great loss you cannot grieve in some fashion. Even if we resist, it persists. We can try to avoid it by business, addictions, denial or intellectualizing. In the end we will wander into it in some corner of our life when we least expect it. The only way to heal is to move through and with our grief. We need to let our feelings be felt and realize that it will take time to heal. We also need to know that grief and loss affect all of us in different ways and in a variety of ways. We sense our loss emotionally and psychologically. We feel angry and disappointed. We question our ability to relate and manage our lives. It affects us socially. Often we feel overwhelmed so we pull away from friends and family. Sometimes they pull away from us because they feel so ill equipped to help. Our relationships change. While we need people who care and know how to be with us, we often push them away. Thank goodness most of us will find a few people able to just sit and listen and be with us without the need to fix and manage our loss. We will experience issues with our faith and God. Some of us might find solace in what we have believed, others of us will be angry with God and need to reestablish our faith. That can take time and can be helped if you have a pastor, priest or rabbi you can be honest with. Grief can take a toll on our bodies. We can feel dizzy, short of breath, have no appetite or find we come down with everything that comes by. And we can feel overwhelmed mentally. Don't be surprised if you are forgetful, can't concentrate, are accident prone or depressed. The waves of grief are really very unpredictable and can overcome over us when we least expect them.

Grief is there to call us to healing. Healing can only happen by moving through our own process of letting go and beginning to move on with our lives. This requires work and trust, trust that you will not always feel helpless, anxious or fearful. You need to be gentle with yourself when your feelings seem inappropriate to the situation. Feelings are feelings. We experience them. They come and go. They are a part of the normal experience of loss. We need to let them out and let them go. We will need to find some people with grace enough to stand by us or go with us to a support group or most importantly, let us cry. C.S. Lewis, the author of "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe", fell in love and married late in life. He and Joy were barely married when she was diagnosed with terminal cancer. The beautiful movie, "Shaddowlands: tells the story of their journey to her death and beyond. He wrote, "If you've been up all night and cried till you have no more tears left in you-you will know that there comes in the end a sort of quietness." This was his way of describing his own grief experience. The healing was that "quietness."

There are certain feelings that seem to be universal to grief besides pain and sadness. One of those is guilt. It pops up in ways we may not expect. It comes with, "if only", or "what if" or "I should have". Guilt is irrational. You can't beat it down. You need to work through it. When we look back at our lives with the loved ones we have lost things can become distorted. None of us are perfect and God loves us as we are. We have nothing to prove. It is always toughest to forgive ourselves. We can help ourselves by reflecting on the good times we had and good things we did. We embrace the living and move on with the truth of today and what can be.

Another common feeling is anger. Life has many ups and downs and all relationships have moments of bliss and despair. When life changes or we loose someone in the midst of one of those times of despair we are left angry. Anger needs to be felt. We need to be given permission to say what we fell. If we try to push anger away because we feel it would be inappropriate we may discover it festers only to pop up again and again. At its worst anger can fester into bitterness which is the most destructive emotion we can have. It is the source of much emotional anguish and disease. It is absolutely ok to admit we are angry that our loved one died, that we lost our job, that our home was destroyed in a fire or that a best friend moved away. People leave us with unresolved issues. No one is perfect. We may need to write them a letter we can never send to them how we feel. We can not move on without working through this anger stage.

In the end we pray that forgiveness will come, not only for ourselves but for all those connected to our loss. When we reach this place we can begin to sense that life is moving on and there is hope and goodness in our world. This is the stage of accepting what happened and kneading it into our present and future. We don't forget. We take our losses with us into a hopeful and healthy future we can mold.

Grief is universal to humankind and because of this we are never alone. There are many who have been there before us and will stretch out their hand to walk with us. Perhaps this will become a new relationship that will blossom into something wonderful. I know of a grief support group that turned onto a wonderful group of friends. They were young widow who met for 12 weeks tow years ago. When the group came to an end they moved on with each other. They still meet every Wednesday night for dinner. They do social things together, their families have become family. Their group has grown to include more survivors. They have and will continue to feel their losses but they have learned to celebrate their healing and their lives. May it be so for you.

Rev. Jayne Hubbard, M.ED, MA Marriage, Family and Therapy, Master Divinity, is pastor of Black Mountain Community Church in Northern Scottsdale. She has been a social worker, family therapist and high school teacher in Kenya, St. Paul, MN, Randolph, VT and Lancaster, PA. Phone: 480-575-1801 and Rev Jayne's email is: paddlingpastor@hotmail.com