10 Things I’ve Learned About Grief

Every experience with grief is unique and nuanced. These are some things I’ve learned as I’ve walked my journey. I hope they encourage you as you travel yours.

1. Grief is a journey.

There’s no part of my life that grief hasn’t touched. I haven't been able to successfully compartmentalize it from other aspects of life. Though the pain doesn’t always sting as offensively as in its initial stages, there are continual future losses that resurrect my pain unexpectedly. Grief is messy and painful and continual. And when it’s caused by death, each new experience must be reconciled by an overshadowing absence of someone I loved.

2. There are some parts of your journey that only you can walk.

Even my closest people didn’t always understand. This was difficult to reconcile because many moved on faster than I could. The truth is others weren’t impacted or changed by the loss like I was. When it felt like others were quite detached from my pain, I needed to remind myself that they weren’t responsible for my healing. I was on my own journey, and it was a grace that some chose to walk it with me. But it was still my grief to work through.

3. Some people may be uncomfortable with negative emotions.

Some people weren’t able to handle the messy, explosive, dark, or ugly parts of my grief. It doesn’t necessarily mean they were terrible people. It may just mean they didn’t have the emotional bandwidth to walk with me and not internalize my emotions in negative ways. As much as they needed to be patient with my process of healing, I also needed to be patient with their process of maturing. It’s important to consider that before cutting people out of your life.        

4. When you remove your ability to feel painful things, you also remove your ability to feel beautiful things.

The emotions associated with grief were so painful that I wanted to do everything I could to remove them. But when you protect yourself from feeling anything painful again, you can also prevent yourself from feeling anything beautiful again. And that can wreak havoc in relationships. The process of grief ultimately leads a person down one of two paths: self-destruction or healing. Choosing to widen my emotional spectrum and deal with my pain played a big role in determining whether I came out hollow or healed.

5. If you shove pain down, it’ll resurrect again when you least expect it.

Pain is an indicator of a problem. I often see pain itself as the problem and try to numb it, avoid it, bury it, or cut it out. Unless I treat the source of pain, it can fester and deteriorate everything around it. Other symptoms start to present, and I may become more susceptible to new issues. Though emotional pain is an internal and often undetectable struggle, left unaddressed, it can cause a great deal of destruction in unintended ways.

6. Time alone doesn’t heal wounds; you need to do some work.

This one was hard for me. Healing didn’t come from passive inaction. Healing required active work on my part. Sometimes actively cutting out pain points felt like progress and healing. But there were a couple problems with this. First, nearly everything and everyone I loved could trigger my grief at some point. Second, the pain was coming from inside me. No matter how many pain points were successfully removed, I couldn’t outrun the pain within. Healing wasn’t something that just happened to me. I had to actively pursue it.

7. There are many layers to process through.

In my experience of healing from loss, I’ve learned the process isn’t linear. Grief is nuanced and layered, and you don’t just “get over” loss. After losing my dad, the first big event that followed was my wedding. Another event that followed later on was the birth of my first child. So, I first had to process losing him as my dad and then later on as a grandfather. While it didn’t undo my healing, it was a future loss I hadn’t considered.

8. Look for people who’ve gone through what you’re going through and come out on the other side healed.

I've found it really helpful to talk with people who’ve experienced grief that's specific to a particular type of loss I'm walking through. Look for someone who has actively pursued healing while grieving. Not only are they understanding, but they’re also experienced to help guide you towards healing. In the initial stages of my grief, it seemed impossible to feel anything other than pain again. Talking with someone who had come through their situation and was walking in healing confirmed that it was both possible and attainable for me too.

9. Supporting someone else going through a similar circumstance is redeeming.

There’s something profoundly redeeming about walking with someone else who’s in the middle of a similar circumstance that you’ve gone through. You’re able to talk with that person on a level of understanding that doesn't require them drudging through a lot of painful details or disclaimers before getting to the heart of the matter. They can speak candidly without having to explain the messiness of their intense feelings of grief. It’s redeeming to allow the pain that you’ve endured to produce something life-giving for someone else who is grieving.

10. Grief will always be a part of your life, but you can learn to cope with it in ways that bring healing.

The journey towards my healing wasn’t just about removing pain. At first, that’s what I wanted because the feelings were intense, messy, overwhelming, and exhausting. It felt suffocating to sit in that place and relive those same feelings day after day. And yet, I learned to move forward. There was no formula. I just took the next step, one day at a time.

It didn’t feel like progress in the moment. But several steps in I started to see a noticeable difference between where I once was and where I am now. And it confirmed I wouldn’t stay in that dark place forever. I realized the memory of someone wouldn’t always sting in such an offensive way. And I was able to move from a painful reminder of loss towards a gratitude of what I had while I had it. It took me a long time to get there and I’ve by no means “arrived”, but the path to healing has been worth the journey.