Don't Take My Grief Away from Me

As you walk through the journey there comes a time when you need to begin to break the pattern of self-absorption and begin to get yourself off of your hands and no longer be dominated by how you feel. I do not know any better way to do this than by reaching out to others in grief and becoming a safe person to them on their journey. That is grief’s twelfth step.

Twelfth Step of AA which demands that, when an alcoholic finds sobriety, he/she must then reach out to help others. That doing so actually helps keep them sober, not just because it is a reminder of what addiction can do to a life, but because it helps get them focused on something besides themselves. Addiction by its very nature means the person has become so self-absorbed that nothing matters except how they feel. Reaching out to others in the middle of the night demands that they think of others and, at least to that degree, breaks the hold of self-absorption.

The night my wife died I said, “I have had fifty-seven years of a wonderful marriage. All I can feel is grateful and lucky for a wonderful life.”

In a very real sense, you will at some point along the lonely road of your pain have to decide if you want to get well. Your answer will largely determine the outcome of your journey.

without trying to fix it or explain it away

I know others who spend the rest of their lives making the person who died into a saint. The loved one becomes larger than life; suddenly he or she becomes the perfect person. All the grieving person can talk about is how wonderful the deceased was when he/she was alive. Often this is a guilt reaction. It can be an effort to make up to the person for some slight, either real or imagined.

Until the feelings return, it is just a process of putting one foot in front of the other; doing your job, not because you feel inspired or joyous in doing so, but simply because it has to be done.

We not only lose the parent, most likely we also lose the home. When a house becomes a home it takes on meaning and memories that we cannot give up with a shrug. It is home and the things there are there because they had an impact on our lives and we felt a sense of security there among them that cannot be duplicated anywhere else.

I have watched grieving people almost drum up their pain for fear that they were forgetting the person or not grieving as much as they should for the person. Sometimes we feel closer to the person when we are hurting and become afraid not to hurt.
The grief journey is a process of moving from the person being in front of our minds, to being a presence we feel in our hearts. That happens when we can become comfortable with not thinking about them all of the time and allow the process to move from their being in front of our face to being alive in our memories and quietly walking beside us through our days.

give yourself permission to grieve for as long as necessary until you can live again. The best advice I can give is feel what you feel. You cannot change the feelings and trying to do so saps your energy, so allow yourself to feel what you feel until the feelings change. They will change.