Day #30:  Your Grief — Tell the World

I have never been super great with explaining my grief but a friend on mine couldn’t have wrote it out better.  Thank you Kari for allowing me to share your words  today.  I think they are completely true to how many of us feel after the loss of a child, including myself.

We live in a society that doesn’t know how to deal with sadness. We are a people who have a hard time feeling without doing. The hard part of living in grief is that that there’s only a limited amount of “stuff” to do.  I have grown to hate the language of grief in our society. We talk about a “grief process” or the “stages of grief” or doing “grief work”, almost like there’s a checklist that a person can work through to ensure adequate and proper grieving.  Sometimes outsiders feel we should have completed that checklist and moved on.

I have learned to consider grief as a state of being…I am ‘in grief’ in the same way we talk about being ‘in love’. I think of the sadness of grief as being in a large body of water, like an ocean, and my only job is to get to shore by whatever means necessary. Gradually, the grief becomes shallower and easier to move in. And, even though I somedays have my feet on dry ground, I will always live in view of the water, and will occasionally get my feet wet.

The challenge for the people around me is accepting that only I can get me to shore- I can’t be rescued from grief. But the beauty of that is that I learn not to be afraid of the water, because I’ve also learned how to swim.