Grief

Grief.

“No one ever told me grief felt so much like fear.” -CS Lewis

Ran across the quote above a few weeks ago and it has been rolling around my brain ever since. In that time I have pondered all the reasons for grief and the aspects grief may manifest in one’s life.

For some folks, grief is accompanied by relief, when the death or loss involved is one that is welcomed, as it comes as a release for either the one who is the loss or the one losing.

For others, it is a deep, life-altering event, where time becomes marked in before and after this specific event. This loss is overwhelming, the time for recovery cannot be marked on an actual linear scale, it is more fluid and cyclical in its aspect of moving past this, which may never happen, if we are honest because your life has been altered irrevocably forever, period.

Other types of grief are the moving on, the loss of an activity, ability, shift in perspective and then remembering at some point later, “oh yeah” and that might cause a moment of “grief” or recognition of a loss from your daily life, possibly no.

What do all these aspects of grief have in common? The loss of some: thing, one or whatever, it is a forever shift in your life that requires an alteration in daily existence, no matter how large or small.

So long story short, it involves a change and a lot of folks FEAR CHANGE, period. They resist it, hate it, avoid it, so grief and loss may trigger things you cannot comprehend, but for them, it becomes their new coping mechanism in their lives.

One of the most unrecognized is Clutter; the slide into clutter is generally a slow-motion shift in just not recognizing or seeing things that now pile up in their lives. Some folks express this as actual stuff, a physical manifestation to fill up the space that is now vacant.

Others become workaholics; they fill up their schedules with things, activities, and things to do so as to not deal with the missing thing/person/activity that is no longer in their lives.

And yet more fall into the overwhelming grief expression of just mourning the loss and any mention of a reminder of the thing/person/activity loss sends them into new rounds of their grief, emotionally. These folks are overtaken by their grief, it is the mantle they wear and the new identity they inhabit, without sometimes recognizing it.

Lastly, there is denial, as one of the acknowledged steps or aspects of grief, which runs deep and can last a lifetime in some cases. This may manifest in such forms as not discussing it, inability to think about whatever was lost, such as stop remembering before, or flat out not acknowledging it happened. What this one does is hold you fast into the process, as you never complete the process of grief.

So in acknowledging the stages, one also has to bear in mind that no two people progress through these in any set pattern. One does not necessarily lead to two and so forth. In some cases, steps are either quickly assimilated or just never touched on, due to the nature of the loss or the person’s personal emotional IQ.

Do you see yourself in any of these aspects? Are you stuck somewhere in the Grief chain? Is there something you are avoiding that actually needs your time and attention?

For me, it was the inability to acknowledge a tragedy in my own life, due to the punishment received for mourning the loss of my father, when I was stolen from him by the said perpetrator. Imagine being a small child and not being able to utter the word Daddy at all, without being beaten? So it was not so much of a denial perse, as an inability to grieve properly the loss of the parent who raised you since you were born. Why, because they could not handle all my emotions, my grief, they did not wish to deal with the consequences of their actions that lead to this, so I suffered for that.

Then, later on, being able to grieve properly losses in my life, I do not move through grief like other folks, and once I figured out the key to that was in recognizing that our grief is in proportion to the amount of love we assigned to that loss, which now has no place to go physically, we have to find other ways to express that love. Remembering the good times, honoring the memory for those things that we lose through death. Through losses of other kinds, we have to find our own way to acknowledge, honor and move through that loss.

My advice in this, reach out to those around you, let them listen to you, to hear you speak on what it is that is causing your grief. If you have a clutter problem, please reach out to a professional if it too much for you to handle, you are not recognizing what it represents for you to work through properly, if you clean it out and it reappears or you feel paralyzed and unable to start. If your people don’t listen, find someone who will and maybe find new people once you get the issue recognized.

Anyone not willing to go through the dark with you is not worthy to stand in the light with you, period. You are worth it, every piece of it. -Namaste

originally posted 2018