Defining and Describing
How do you define grief? What words can you use to describe your own grief? If you were writing a play or a story and grief were a character, how would you depict it? Is it your enemy or your companion, however unwelcome?
Grief , Different Words, Different Disguises
I spend a lot of time exploring words and thoughts. Grief is definitely, both a word, a concept and a feeling I contemplate and walk alongside of with some regularity. I don’t do this because I’m obsessed with it. I do it because it’s a familiar companion, wanted or not. It’s something I know intimately in its different disguises. It’s something I help people learn to tame, so they, too, can live with it and go on to have peace and meaningful lives (on their own terms).
I often find myself examining words and phrases in the wee hours of the night when I would rather be sleeping. Words or titles for things I am in the midst of writing like to pop up, just as I am drifting to sleep. Suddenly I am awake and frantically jotting down ideas on scraps of paper with the bedside lamp on its dimmest setting. Slippery words may visit, taunt, and try to elude me by poking their heads out of the shadows for a fleeting moment. Then they slip away, returning later to interrupt some new activity or thought process. Grief has a habit of doing this too. The words are sometimes coming up for things I am planning to write, or hoping to write, though the ideas are just beginning to germinate. They are words that sit on top of feelings and the feelings want and need to find their way out of the darkness. Grief needs to do this too, and must gradually be taught to work its way to the surface on your terms, as you wend your way to an eventual place of acceptance. If acceptance may sound passive to you and like giving up, it’s not at all.
Five Letter Word With a Big Punch
Grief is a big, even terribly heavy word, though it has only five letters. You know grief if you have lived with it. There are so many reasons it visits people. If you haven’t experienced it, you may be puzzled by the way people who have, may attempt to handle it. You may try to keep away from those who are being newly visited by grief because it frightens you. It may make you quite uncomfortable. That is sad, yet seems to be the way it has gotten to be in Western cultures.
You may give grievers you know some unwanted advice, such as to “get over it” or tell them it’s time to “move on”. Oh how I wish you would not say those things, wouldn’t spew platitudes. You will learn not to one day, because nobody escapes grief. That includes those who try to bury it, to ignore it till they can’t and to pretend it doesn’t exist, or isn’t such a big deal. There are also those who “medicalize” it, or to make it an aberration or an illness.
Enemy or Companion
Grief can be your enemy, if you allow it. It can cause you to shiver in fear as you crouch in the foxhole of your own making, waiting for the next attack. You can view it as the terrorist that has invaded you and is destroying your life. You can view it as something that has cursed you, but that others simply cannot see or understand. Sadly, you might be inclined to think of your grief as a manifestation of Satan, plaguing and victimizing you in harmful ways you will never escape.
Another option or way of being is to view it as your companion, a familiar one that is within us all and is a normal response to life’s losses, changes, fiascos and curveballs. You can let it have its say at times. That doesn’t mean you permit it to hog the stage constantly and forever. It sounds easy to just “not allow it”, but no, you have to learn how. You have to want to tame it and to not see the taming as a betrayal of your love, or a denial of your painful or disappointing past, or your “failures”. Grief is a human state and yes, you are deeply and beautifully human. Your grief is just one aspect of you and of the love and the hopes you have allowed yourself in this lifetime.
You Choose
It is ultimately your choice how you will feel it and how you will let it be with you. Grief can be sharp and jagged, cutting your delicate flesh every waking day, every new month, anniversary, birthday, event and new year. It can be a mighty wall, blocking you from every new opportunity. It can be thunderously loud. Your grief can feel like a heavy, weighted cloak that doesn’t calm anxiety, but that covers you and shuts out the light. You can let it smack you upside the head a million times a day, telling you “I’m your curse and will never stop making you miserable”.
The other side of this is that you can learn, with practice and sometimes with necessary help, to embrace it as your companion, whether an invited one or not. There will be times when your own grief is as quiet as dandelion seed puffs floating around your backyard. Your grief might be found sitting quietly on your shoulder, whispering negative things in your ear, but you don’t have to listen to it every minute, every day. You are allowed to take healthy breaks and also are allowed to feel it when you need to. You will sometimes need to, despite the lack of understanding from some in your world, or how successfully you have been using your taming skills most of the time. You are allowed to use it to grow and even to help others through it, (or not) or to walk beside them as they feel it, even if you can’t help them.
Whenever you’re ready, my friends and readers, you can learn not to allow grief to control your every thought, feeling and action. It may still be cruel and relentless when you least expect it, jumping in front of you to block your forward movement and peace. However, you can develop the tools and strategies, (When you decide you’re ready!) as well as the acquired experience and determination to look it in the eye and to refuse to let it control you forever. Grief is not the leader of your life and destiny. You can choose the best memories while acknowledging the most difficult ones. You will feel the grief walking next to you, along with all the love within you. You will not accept it and let it become all that you are.
A few other posts about grief and loss here on this blog, Life’s Changing Seasons. (There are many.)
https://visionpoweredcoaching.com/grief-doesnt-wait-death/
https://visionpoweredcoaching.com/discovering-secrets-after-death/
https://visionpoweredcoaching.com/inner-survivor/
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Iris J. Arenson-Fuller, PCC, CPC is a Grief and Loss Transformation/Life Reinvention/Women’s Confidence Coach
Iris helps mid-life and older women (and sometimes others) though grief and loss, and helps them figure out how to reinvent life, in spite of what they’ve lived through. She also helps people redesign their lives just because they’re ready to be more peaceful, purposeful and successful.
Grief isn’t only about loss through death!
Would like to have a free, confidential conversation with Iris to discuss working with her to tame your own grief and achieve a more peaceful, happier, more successful life, no matter what you may have been through? Contact Iris through this web site, or email her.
Find Iris on Facebook at https://www.facebook.com/visionpoweredcoaching
