Gwynn Raimondi, MA

On Grief :: The passage of time

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I was tired of well-meaning folks, telling me it was time I got over being heartbroke. When somebody tells you that, a little bell ought to ding in your mind. Some people don’t know grief from garlic grits. There’s somethings a body ain’t meant to get over. No I’m not suggesting you wallow in sorrow, or let it drag on; no I am just saying it never really goes away. (A death in the family) is like having a pile of rocks dumped in your front yard. Every day you walk out and see them rocks. They’re sharp and ugly and heavy. You just learn to live around them the best way you can. Some people plant moss or ivy; some leave it be. Some folks take the rocks one by one, and build a wall.

~Michael Lee West, American Pie

Loss, and the accompanying grief, are not things we can simply “get over” or “move past.” When there is a death, it is a death.  The person who died is not coming back.  They will leave a hole in our hearts and lives for as long as we ourselves continue to breathe.  In time we learn to live with the hole.  In time the hole doesn’t ache as much or as often. In time, we find ways to work around and in and above the hole.  But that hole, it’s still there.

And even though our person will always be gone, and even though we will always grieve this truth, it is also true that in time and when we allow ourselves to process our grief, the grief does become… less intense, less raw, less constant.

This is not to say that even years later there aren’t moments or hours or days of intense grief, of deeply missing our person.  Those days will exist.  And they will be less common than in those early days and months of loss.

We live in a culture that would have us believing that grief shouldn’t last for very long.  Many companies offer three days of “bereavement pay”.  THREE DAYS.  Let me tell you from experience, that isn’t even enough time to plan the funeral or memorial service, let alone have space to actually grieve and cry and howl about our loss.

The DSM-5 (the holy bible of the psychology world) tells us that six months after our clients experience a loss, we need to evaluate them for complex grief disorder.  SIX MONTHS.

Yes, our culture, and my profession, has turned grief into a disorder. (Note there is much debate about this particular diagnosis/disorder within the psychology community and particularly those of us who work with grief and the grieving.)

There is also a timeline, a linear path, for us to follow when it comes to our grief.  Kublar-Ross gave us the Five Stages of Grief, and this has been interpreted for many to mean this is how we should be grieving and if we don’t follow this path in a timely manner, well then there is clearly something wrong with us.  (I much prefer Worden’s Tasks of Grief as way of looking at our grieving process.  I’ll write more about that in the third and final essay of this series).

These timelines are put upon us for a reason:: in our culture we do not like to experience discomfort, and will go to any lengths to avoid it.  This includes the discomfort that bubbles up when either we ourselves, or someone we care about, is experiencing and processing their own grief and loss.

Because let’s be honest, grief and loss are uncomfortable to say the least.  As the person experiencing it, it is a visceral experience, our whole body responds to the death of someone we love.  As the person who is there to be of support to the grieving, there is also discomfort, both physical in the sensing of the visceral experience of our loved one who is grieving, and also the existential discomfort of facing our own mortality and the mortality of those we love.

Because 100% of us will die at some point.  And 100% of us will also experience grief and loss, at least once, in our lives (for most of us, we will have this experience multiple times).

And frankly, most of us don’t want to sit with or in any of that.  And we were never shown how to sit in and with that discomfort.  It was never modeled for us how to stay in our bodies and allow the pain and agony of grief and loss to run through us. In my opinion, this is something we need to change for ourselves, and for future generations.  We need to learn how to acknowledge, allow, and sit with these uncomfortable and unpleasant sensations and emotions, otherwise they will continue to exist within us and create their own havoc upon our bodies and minds.

The reality is, that grief is a life-long process.  Yes, it comes in waves.  Yes it can become less intense with time and processing.  Yes, it won’t always feel as raw as in those first days and months and year.  And yes, even decades later, we will miss our person.

I talk more about this in the 14-minute video below ::

This essay is the second in a three part series I have written exploring grief and loss, how it affects us, and how our culture attempts to stifle it. Here are links to the others in the series ::

On Grief :: Loss is Loss

On Grief :: The Passage of Time (this essay)

On Grief :: Holidays, Anniversaries, and Other Triggers (link coming soon)

On Grief :: Loss is loss

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You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it. 

~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

For three years I worked/interned/externed as a grief counselor for a local family grief support center.  The clients I worked with were as young as four and as old as in their 70s.  The losses ranged from parent loss to sibling loss to child loss to intimate partner loss.  The kinds of deaths our clients loved ones experienced were cancers and heart attacks, car accidents and random shootings, and all forms of suicide.

We mostly offered groups, for appropriate age ranges and types of loss.  One of our tenets for all the groups is: “We do not compare losses.”  Meaning that grief is grief.  Our person is gone and while the way they exited this life may have been dramatic or mundane, our hearts are broken all the same.

In all the groups I co-facilitated, this was never an issue.  We set the boundary up front and no one ever tried to play the “My grief is better/worse than yours” game.

I’ve seen that game played out in life outside the center though.  Hell, I’ve even played that game.

When we are hurting, when we are in the rawness of our grief, the immediate, and traumatic, impact of it, it can be hard to notice how others may be hurting, may have experienced similar loss, may be grieving right along side you with your loss.

Those early days and weeks and months of grief have us self-focused.  Because our pain is so intense.  And even if we need to function and care for others as we are feeling our own pain, the hurt, the what feels to be all consuming hurt, is ours and through this lens we look at the world.

So, it makes sense in those early days and weeks and months that we may deeply believe that our own pain is greater than another’s.  That no one has ever suffered in this kind of rawness as we are.  The no one could possibly understand what we are experiencing.

And as is often the case with the stories we tell ourselves in our heads, none of this is necessarily true.

It is true that no one has experienced the exact form of grief, in the exact way, that we each have.  We are each individuals, with similar, yet vastly unique experiences.

And.

Grief is part of being human.  Loss is part of our lived experience.

And no matter what the loss is, it is uncomfortable at best, excruciatingly painful at worst.  No matter the loss, grief comes and goes in waves that sometimes we feel we will drown in and others we are able to surf.

Yes, our personal experiences are unique, and they are also universal.

I talk more about this in the 12 minute video below.

This essay is the first in a three part series I have written exploring grief and loss, how it affects us, and how our culture attempts to stifle it. Here are links to the others in the series ::

On Grief :: Loss is Loss (this essay)

On Grief :: The Passage of Time

On Grief :: Holidays, Anniversaries, and Other Triggers (link coming soon)