As we wrap up our series on grief recovery and completion, I want to return once more to an aspect of grieving that’s often overlooked or avoided.
Honest grief.
It’s the belief that it’s counterproductive and usually dangerous to avoid truth in grief, either with yourself, your family members, your friends or involved children.
Let’s look at this one more time.
Illusions and euphemisms harm rather than protect—
While avoiding the topic of grief, or any difficult topic, may look like a good idea in the short term, putting off truth-telling usually sets you up for future failure and larger problems down the road.
When you avoid, you often end up believing or spreading inaccuracies. Or allowing them to take root and spread. The way to avoid those inaccuracies is to communicate honestly about your emotional reaction to the pain of loss.
Author Alisa Childers describes grief as “harrowing.” Indeed, it is. It can feel as though you’re standing on a jagged precipice you’re either going to fall off or jump off. In her book Another Gospel? she notes:
“Something they don’t tell you in the movies is that upon receiving cataclysmic news, your body betrays you. My knees began to shake wildly, and my throat became dry and my voice creaking.”
Yes, as shock hits the body, which it did when Childers received news that her beloved 20-year-old nephew had died from a drug overdose, the bodily systems fail.
And right along with that, the emotion systems break down. It can feel as though your heart implodes. A weight that you can’t push off crushes your chest. Inflammation and the fight to survive tears through the body. And all that fighting and desperate attempt to equilibrate and normalize causes exhaustion.
Tell the truth about your feelings. Don’t hurt yourself, or others, (including children), with avoidance and lies or half-truths and euphemisms. As the Grief Recovery Institutes professionals note: “Silence or avoidance of the realities about loss creates more problems than it solves.”
Unspoken feelings can lead others to wrong conclusions about your feelings. Be honest. Be clear. Be effective at this process we call grief.
Being honest about your feelings gives you freedom to heal, and to thrive again.
When grieving progress, isn’t—
Before quiet, sterile funeral homes arrived on the scene, families usually gathered together to wash, prepare and dress the body of a deceased relative. It’s safe to assume that the mostly women and girls performing this task talked and reminisced about the deceased. They shared memories and feelings.
Then the body was laid in what used to be called the parlor, (now the living room, thanks to Better Homes Magazine), for several days so other family, friends and neighbors could come, pay their last respects, do more reminiscing and chat with the surviving grievers.
Food was shared. Time was offered and spent. Tears were shed. And stories told.
Now the process makes death more removed, more foreign, less personal.
Much of the important (and meaning-packed) ritual has been removed. Even a traditional funeral service, with the casket carried in, placed near the altar, and then carried back out to a waiting hearse, has largely been replaced with a “memorial service” to sing worship songs, chat (a little) about the deceased, and then maybe enjoy a potluck buffet in the church fellowship hall or a favorite restaurant or club.
Eighty years of life gets you an hour memorial and some sweet and sour meatballs, or a cheese ball and crackers.
The older I get the better raucous Irish wakes look to me.
This new minimalistic tradition can hamper grieving and healing. I would do all that I could to resist rushing through it, or be rushed through it because a well-meaning friend wanted to protect me.
And, yes, have a funeral or memorial (Do something!)—
In this uncertain and disruptive time we live in, I still believe we should do whatever we can to have a funeral or memorial service, even if that means inviting people to join via ZOOM, or some other recording technology to watch a service and burial; or join together in an online meeting to share eulogies, express grief, thankfulness or memories together.
There is a tremendous amount of healing and grief progress that comes with these rituals, these rights of passage for not only the deceased, but most especially for the remaining friends and loved ones.
Don’t deprive yourself or others of this passage. It will be difficult, but it will be worth—for you and others.
NEXT WEEK: a word on giving thanks in all circumstances and kicking off the holidays. They’re certainly going to be different this year.
But Thanksgiving will be BIG for our family, at least in spirit and celebration.
The engineer and I are going to welcome our first grandchild into the world this week. To say we are excited is an understatement!
Until then,
may God guide you through any grieving process you may find yourself traversing to the light on the other side of its darkness.
Blessings,
Andrea
“Beloved, I pray that you prosper in all things and be in health, just as your soul prospers” (3 John).
Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, speaker, award-winning inspirational writer, memoirist, and senior-ordained chaplain (IFOC). She helps people thrive physically, emotionally, and spiritually, and recover from grief, loss and trauma.