Grief

Grief-- It doesn’t seem like the most encouraging topic to write about, but when we lean into the experience, a liberating freedom can be found on the other side. Along the journey from grief to freedom, there is a beautiful exchange from being a victim of our circumstance to surrender and empowerment. 

Merriam Websters Definitions:

Grief: a deep and poignant distress caused by or as if by bereavement.

Bereavement: the state or fact of being deprived of something or someone.

Laymen terms:

Grief: feeling distressed due to a state/fact of losing something or someone.

It is not uncommon to associate grief with the loss of a loved one, death, or dying. But in limiting our conceptualization of grief, we miss opportunities to grieve and walk into deeper levels of freedom. In fact, I have personally found that changing my schema of grief to include “things” (i.e. dreams, visions, ideas, goals, expectations) can help me to not only heal but also grow. Sure it is possible to move through sadness without grieving, but in grieving there is a chance to fully heal and grow, rather than living with a sadness that is superficially healed by replacements or the business of life.

Christian theologian and author of the well-known Chronicles of Narnia series, wrote a novel, A Grief Observed after he lost his wife to cancer and his faith was challenged. Regarding his experience with grief he writes that “grief is like a long valley; a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” The bends in the grief process aren’t easily recognized, but when we are able to recognize them and gently walk on them, instead of attempting to run backwards, we find a new landscape.

Recently, I spent a significant amount of time trying to avoid a situation that was unravelling in front of me. My unwillingness to acknowledge the loss of a dream looked like an effort to control the circumstance, to hold on, to change the situation. It was emotionally draining, fruitless, and anything but empowering. After reaching a point of utter exhaustion, I realized that I was trying to control a situation rather than coming face to face with acknowledging what I had already lost. I was so scared of truly accepting what I had already lost because of fear that I might lose more. Lewis astutely writes, “no one ever told me that grief felt so like fear”. It was this experience, where I began to recognize that fears can sometimes be an indictor of needing to grieve.

The beautiful thing in my recent situation was that when I surrendered and began to grieve the loss of a dream, I no longer felt like horrible things were happening. As I accepted, I became empowered to learn new boundaries and pathways that had the possibility of eventually leading to a new landscape. I went from being trapped as a victim of my unravelled dream to appreciating my situation and having hope that my new growth would lead to something even more beautiful than the original dream. Whether I chose to grieve or not, the loss of the dream had already happened. But in embracing the grief, instead of just replacing the dream with another dream, I learned invaluable skills in moving forward that would equip me to dream holistically with a more complete understanding of myself.

All too often we reserve the concept of grieving to people. By no means am I discounting the grieving process associated with the loss of a loved one (in fact it deserves it’s own page), but for today’s purposes, can you expand grieving to other arenas? It is also not uncommon for loss of a loved one to also include these other “things”. Are there areas of your life that feel heavy? Is there a dream, expectation, or pattern of behavior that you need to let go and grieve because it no longer serves you? Sometimes even destructive things that once served a purpose, like addictions, relationships, habits, need to be grieved to properly move forward into something better. It is important to acknowledge our feelings when we lose something or someone (even if they are not dead) that once brought purpose and survival, but I would encourage you to not stay stuck there. Risk properly letting go and grieving, and in doing so you will find beautiful opportunities on the other side that await to be discovered.