Grief and Honesty
Until you experience the loss of someone you love, or have a close friend or family member who has lost someone, you probably never knew how many writers and books there were on the subject of grief. Type the word grief into Google and you get more than 93 million results. Type grief into Amazon and there are 26,461 results. Either way, that is a lot of authors writing a lot of books, articles and blogs. So where do you go? Where do you start?
One of the books I turn to is C.S. Lewis’ A Grief Observed. Why? I appreciate Lewis’ honesty about his own personal struggle with grief after the death of his wife. From the start of the book he talks openly about what grief feels like to him. While grief is different for everyone, feeling the invisible separation from others is very common.
No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting.
Lewis, a deeply religious person, also talks openly about his thoughts of God during grief:
Where is God?… Go to him when your need is desperate, when all other help is in vain, and what do you find? A door slammed in your face.
In another part of the book, he is “speaking to” his deceased wife about his grief and her “leaving” him; in this he compares her death to an amputation he is experiencing:
Did you ever know, dear, how much you took away with you when you left? You have stripped me even of my past, even of the things we never shared. I was wrong to say the stump was recovering from the pain of the amputation. I was deceived because it has so many ways to hurt me that I discover them only one by one.
What do you do with your experience of grief? Some people are not sure what to do and spend days in a kind of a fog, feeling lost. Others try to bury it, to not feel the pain; as if not feeling means the loss of their loved one didn’t happen. They don’t talk about the loss, or maybe even the person who died. Sometimes they try to stay busy with work so they don’t have time to think about anything else. Or they may try to self-medicate with prescriptions, alcohol or other drugs in an effort to mask the pain. However, none of these will really help you adjust to life without the person you love so much.
So what is helpful? Be open and honest about your emotions – the sometimes troubling or scary thoughts you have, including any anger or resentment you harbor toward the person who died. Or it may be just the depth of the loss you feel.
Grief is messy business! You never know exactly where it will take you. The best way to mourn your loss is following your own personal grief pathway. Be open and honest with what you experience along the way. Write it down in a journal, as C.S. Lewis did. It can be helpful to look at six months or a year later to see where you have been and how you have grown. Seek out friends who will be available to just listen. You may not need or even want their advice and it is okay to say that. Often just a shoulder to cry on and a hug is best. If needed, seek the help of a professional. You can use the links on my website to call me (512) 468-2365, send me an email (ray@lightfindinghope.com), or use the calendar link on my website to schedule an appointment.
