books, bricks, grief –
it’s all in the way
you embrace it, balance it, carry it
when you cannot, and would not,
put it down
-Mary Oliver
I came across the following quote from a grief professional, and it strikes me as pretty significant: “We need to remember that grief is an experience, not a process.”
In Western culture, there’s a lot of talk about the grieving “process,” a word that suggests there’s an ultimate end to grief after moving through a series of stages or steps. Our Western understanding of grief tends to teach that there’s a mourning period, perhaps lasting up to a year, and after that, the griever returns to “normal” life.
I find that paradigm to be both unrealistic and unhelpful. And as someone who has spoken with many widowed people and survivors of other tragic losses, I know I’m not the only one who feels this way.
Grief, like love, doesn’t end after one year, two years or even ten years. The sheer weight of grief, the intensity of it, the way it seems to consume a person—all these things will shift over time. But I don’t think there is ever a point when grief ends. It’s not as if we spend a few months feeling some intense feelings and then, magically, it’s over and we’re back to our former selves. There is no end date to grief because there is no end date to the loss. We will continue to experience the loss of a loved one as time goes on, and thus we continue to experience our grief as well.
When a person loses a spouse, they don’t just lose them in the present moment. They lose all the shared memories of the past as well as the plans, hopes, dreams and goals they had for the future. They lose that person throughout time.
Since losing my husband, memories come up for me—inside jokes, trips we’d taken, intimate conversations we’d had, things that only the two of us had experienced—and I crave his physical presence so he can share in the remembering of such events. I want these experiences mirrored back to me, and in doing so, the intimate details of our shared universe are reinforced.
But that whole universe has shattered, and no one is left to reflect it back to me. I find that I’m not only missing my partner, but I’m missing a piece of my own soul. The loss of our shared universe, and the loss of a part of my self, is so deeply painful. Something profound has been taken away, and yet I’m in touch with the hopeless understanding that what was can never be again. Although I know our shared past was real, I sometimes have moments where it seems as though it was a dream.
I also lost out on all the plans my husband and I had for our future: the decisions we were going to make as a couple, the challenges we were going to face together, the travels we were meant to take, the joint creative projects we had discussed, the family gatherings, the intellectual discussions, the cultural endeavors, the secret looks only the two of us understood, the adventures both monumental and quotidian, the on-going love and support he would have given me as I pushed myself artistically and professionally, and the love and support I so desperately wanted to continue to give to him as he strove to reach his own goals. I lost my partner throughout time and not just in a single moment.
With a loss of this magnitude, it’s impossible to return to life as it was before. There is no “normal” to return to. Even if your routines are the same, everything is different. How to laugh at a friend’s joke, how to let in laughter or lightness of any kind, when the world has gone dark for you because your person is no longer here? How to complete a project at work, or apply for a new job, when nonsensical tragedy has rendered everything seemingly meaningless? How to enjoy a concert, an art exhibit, a film, even just a walk in nature, when your person isn’t there to experience it with you, and when your person will never be able to experience anything ever again? How to hold both the menial logistics of everyday life—grocery lists, household tasks, work or childcare schedules—in the same brain that is processing a horrific, tragic loss that defies logical understanding?
Instead of attempting to return to what was normal before the loss after a prescribed “mourning period,” perhaps the goal has to be to find a new normal, a new stasis, a new foundation on which to rebuild one’s life, and to incorporate the grief into this new normal. For me, this search for the new normal is still very much a work in progress. But I’ve found that, not only are the above questions perfectly reasonable in context, but working through these questions is actually part of the new normal. Figuring out how to make space for both the debilitating sadness over the sudden loss of my husband as well as the small victories of maintaining connections with others and discovering who I am now, post-traumatic loss, is part of the work of grief. A grieving person can absolutely experience joy again. It’s just that joy doesn’t cancel out grief.
My love for the people I’ve lost remains intact, and will always be intact, and my grief is an extension of that love. It takes courage for a person to own their pain, especially when the rest of the world seems to insist they “let go” and “move on.” The pain of my losses will be with me for the rest of my life–and I cannot, and would not, put it down.
Notes on Grief 