Grief

I was looking for a quote about grief and this one spoke to me. It seemed to capture what I was trying to articulate.

This week has been tough. Heck, the past couple of weeks have been tough. Who am I kidding? The past 6 weeks have been tough.

I’m grieving. On so many levels, and for so many things. It seems to come at me from all sides and all angles, which is so different, and I’m unaccustomed to this barrage.

I’ve had times when I’ve been really sad: when my Grandma passed away, or when I was going through my miscarriages. But for the most part, the grief was focused on one event (or theme of events). I could name it and claim it (although maybe not as well when I was right in the middle of it). But I knew what it was and could focus on healing from it.

I am also mourning the loss of certainty. We don’t know when we might start opening back up, or if there will be a soccer season. Will we return to school in September? What else might be cancelled? Are we making a difference? Are we flattening the curve? There are so many questions, and what feels like, very few answers. I watch the daily updates, and Dr. Hinshaw’s calm demeanor reassures me for a little while, but soon enough, it seems like I feel overwhelmed again.

When I read advice about dealing with grief and loss (I am no expert – I’m not sure I even took a psychology course in university, outside of educational psychology anyway), many people talk about finding gratitude. I agree that focusing on gratitude helps focus my lens to a more positive vantage point, but I also think it’s important to acknowledge that I can feel gratitude that my family is safe, or that spring has finally arrived and we can be outside, while still grieving loss. I have room for both feelings and I know I need to grieve too. Gratitude can help me be patient when I am at the store, or to reset my perspective when the sun isn’t shining, but we are also living through a crisis; a global pandemic, and I think feeling the loss doesn’t make me incapable of also seeing the light.

It's bigger than finding gratitude though. I think acknowledging my grief and naming it so that I can process it is important or eventually, it will just weigh me down and it will block out the sunshine. I think that we sometimes have a simplistic view (although unintentionally so) of emotions. When someone asks how we are, we answer with a single emotion, but rarely are we simply happy, but rather we might be happy with a hint of sorrow. Or excited with some underlying trepidation. While we are going through this challenging time, I think it’s OK to acknowledge these complex emotions. We might feel a mix of gratitude, fear and loss all marbled together. Ultimately, I hope that the positive emotions are more prevalent though.

I was given advice years ago when I was going through a tough time; they told me that it was essential that I work through the emotional pieces of the experience and I would know that I had done that when I could speak about it without the emotion; and like it was a fact or an event that had happened. I’m not there yet. I’m still quite emotional; although getting better. I seem to be having more good days than bad lately, but I know I’m not through it yet. But I know I will get there; I just wish I knew how long it would take. And I think that advice, while definitely appropriate for some events, may not actually apply for all. I can speak about my miscarriages without the overwhelming emotion of when I was in the middle of them. But I am not sure the sadness will go away when I think about losing people I love, and I think that at this point, that’s OK; hopefully it just stops being overwhelming.

Note: I wrote this when I was feeling especially vulnerable. I thought about writing something different for this post, but I felt it was important to be honest. Looking back, I see the past few posts have been more raw and I wanted to note that I am having good days too; definitely more lately that the sun is out and the grass is turning green.