Article
Until recently I didn’t have an article or poem about grief. I never was able to put to words how I felt either. A friend of mine posted this on her daughter’s caring bridge site when God called her baby home. It is always on my mind.
“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. After my son died, I grew 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. 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 will someday have my feet on dry ground again, 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.”
While we are in the ocean swimming we sometimes have to find something to help us stay afloat. I think of it as putting on a life jacket so I can swim to shore. That life jacket can be something like trying to focus on the positives in each day or really anything that keeps you above water. For me I find my life jacket to be God. As long as I keep him on I can stay afloat. I may not move toward shore but I am not sinking either. If I take off the life jacket thinking I can do it by myself…I might be okay for a while but I am going to get tired of swimming and treading water. It is at that point I am forced to make the choice to put on that life jacket again or face the reality that I might just sink. I don’t want to go there so I put on that life jacket and keep on going.
One thing I have learned is you can’t make me put on that life jacket. It is my choice. The life jacket doesn’t save me from my grief. It isn’t a magic thing that makes the pain go away. It doesn’t “make me better” immediately. It is my choice to talk, seek help, deal with my grief. You can nudge me to put on the life jacket, even suggest it but shoving it on me doesn’t help. It makes me feel like you don’t understand my grief or that you aren’t listening to me. You might have been my life jacket for the day and by forcing it onto me you have removed it’s floating power. Shoving it on and having it not work makes me feel like I am still sinking and may scare me enough not to try it again. It can also mean the end of a friendship or relationship.
Some day we will reach land and won’t need that grief life jacket as often. Just as I imagine that my feet will get wet once in a while for this loss, I also imagine I may need that life jacket again for another one. However, for now mine is packed away in my heart waiting for another storm.
