Incomplete Grief – Andrea Arthur Owan

Incomplete Grief: Part II

HAS ANYONE ever said to you that you don’t seem as though you’ve finished grieving yet? Have you ever felt that way years after a loss?

Perhaps what they really mean to say is that you’re experiencing incomplete grief.

What is the real goal of grieving?

Many of us think the goal of grieving is to experience deep, painful emotions and finally arrive at the point where they aren’t as noticeable or don’t bother us as much as they did when the loss was fresh. A point where we feel as though we can get back to some kind of normal life.

But is that really the point of grieving?

It is. And it isn’t.

The point and task of grieving are to first grieve, feel all those emotions, and then complete the relationship with all the unfinished emotions you had when the relationship ended or the loss occurred.

You can think of it as unfinished business that niggles your brain and causes frustration or regret.

While grieving occurs automatically, completing the grief—or grief completion—results from specific actions you take to make that happen.

Well-meaning but bad grief advice—

You’ve probably heard someone say, “It’s best not to dwell on the past.” Or “Better let bygones be bygones.”

They sound like good practices, but in the long run they can be dangerous.

Why?

Because the human mind functions in a very different and specific way than the human heart. And vice versa.

The human mind tends to hang onto and replay what ifs—what could or should have been different, better or more. And those different, better and more thoughts can devour us emotionally, year after year after year.

It’s natural for us to do this. And where grief is concerned, it’s better to go along with that persistent brain, answer those questions, and take some steps to complete the thought and the revelations that come with it.

Incomplete grief can be about good things too—

As the experts at The Grief Recovery Institute note:

“Incomplete grief exists when there are any undelivered communications of an emotional nature.”

With that definition, you can easily see how incomplete grief can come from both good and bad events. They can be positive or negative.

For example: Let’s say you received a gift from a special friend and written and mailed a thank you note. But the morning after mailing the card, you learn your friend has died of a stroke. Besides the pain of losing a good friend, what feelings would you have about the loss?

One thought probably replaying over and over in your mind is that you wish your friend had known just how much you appreciated her gift. And now she’ll never know. Something has been left unfinished. And it hurts.

What if the last thing your spouse heard before driving off to work and getting killed in an auto accident was your snippy comment about something he did that morning that irked you? You would likely chastise yourself repeatedly over your unloving last words. Replay what you should have said to him; wish you could have apologized.

As Grief Recovery Institute experts point out:

“As a generality, undelivered emotional communications are going to be about things that we wish we had said or done, or about things we wish we had not said or done.”

And they’re also about something else, like the things we wish the other person had said or done, or not said or done.

But they can be about good things too. And it’s important to replay those.

Consider the happy scenario, where you share a kiss and a long hug with your spouse before you both depart for work. Later that day you learn he’s been killed in a freak work accident. Along with your heartache, you replay in your mind your last embrace, your loving goodbye, his joyful wave to you as he drives down the driveway. Those thoughts make you smile and bring gladness to your broken heart.

The reality of life is that we never know when our last encounters with someone will occur, and it’s more than likely that every loss brings with it unfinished details—words you wanted or planned to say, discussions you wanted to have, plans you were in the midst of making. Not procrastination but planned for events and get-togethers.

These types of things can leave you with a feeling of incompleteness in a relationship loss.

When others hinder your grief completion journey—

You may experience incomplete grieving when others cause or exaggerate your incompleteness.

Ever know someone who won’t allow you to express meaningful things to them? Your communication with them remains shallow or frustrating. We can’t force anyone to listen to us, and their refusal to hear or listen can leave us with incomplete feelings about them and the relationship.

Sometimes we’re fearful of being honest and saying things we know are emotionally loaded. We fear another person’s reaction, or their misunderstanding of your intentions.

We want to wait for the right time, but it never comes. And death ends the possibility of it ever coming.

We lose our nerve and never say what we need to say to the other person.

These events can leave us with incomplete emotions.

I can give you a personal example in my life that I still find frustrating. An event that left me with incomplete emotions.

For a reason I don’t understand, someone I considered a precious friend and loved like a sister decided “the season of our friendship had come to an end.”

That’s how she put it in the email she sent me. Not in person. Not in a phone call. She wouldn’t talk to me about why, explain her reasons, or tell me what I might have done to hurt her to cause that decision. I even asked her so I could apologize for how I might have hurt her.

She did tell me that we hadn’t communicated that much since she moved across the country, so I did get an inkling that she felt that, to remain good friends, I didn’t meet her frequent communication expectations.

It’s been a year since that happened, and I still experience incomplete grieving over it. My heart still cries about it. I miss her. But I feel as though she tied my hands and made my grieving difficult. I don’t think she acted loving or fair toward me.

And that makes me angry.

I feel as though her actions robbed me of the opportunity to be complete.

But her actions do not need to become the final say in this friendship ending. I need to heal, completely. So I’m going through the actions I need to take to complete that grieving, the actions I’m going to teach you in this incomplete grieving series. Actions I’ve taken before that helped me complete the grieving process and close open, festering wounds that took their toll on not only my mind but my body.

Goal of complete grieving—

Your goal is to discover those undelivered emotional communications occurring in both minor and major life events.

It’s the uncovering of all the undelivered communications, both large and small, that have emotional consequences for you. And it’s likely there is a heap of these undelivered communications that need unearthing and examination.

Where my former friend is concerned, I’m going to be exploring all of the unfinished communications and feelings I had when the relationship ended. I’m going to detail how the way she ended it makes me feel.

In the process I’m going to take into account the numerous overwhelming burdens in her life: the recent and unexpected death of a loved one; the illness of a beloved relative; the serious accident she incurred a year earlier that seemed to leave her mentally foggy and fearful of life.

In this specific instance, it’s a combination of juggling truth with love and mercy.

And in the process, I can’t tell myself I shouldn’t feel the way I feel. I already feel a certain way, have experienced certain feelings. Telling myself I shouldn’t feel them isn’t going to make them go away. Examining them, figuring out what to do with them, and then doing it will ease the burden and complete my grief.

And that’s the end goal.

Invitation—

Can you identify any relationships that ended by separation or death that still feel incomplete? If so, start jotting down those happy, sad, or unfinished events you wanted to continue, wanted to fix, or wanted to finish. You’ll use those in a future post to be able to complete your grieving.

NEXT WEEK we’ll dig deeper into incomplete grieving: how holding onto feelings may be stifling the grief completion process, and learning to express the feelings that will help us heal.

Until then, don’t be afraid to feel those feelings, and don’t let anyone tell you that you shouldn’t have them.

Blessings,

Andrea

Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, award-winning inspirational writer and senior-ordained chaplain. She works and writes to help people recover from trauma, grief and loss and to live their best lives — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.

Incomplete Grief: An Introduction

A LOT of people ask how long grief will last, when will it finally be over.

When will the pain end?

How we answer those questions depends upon how we approach grief and the recovery process caused by the grieving experience. The recovery process should lead to completion of grief.

How we handle the fallout of loss and the accompanying pain is what’s important.

Because if we don’t handle the loss well, it can lead to incomplete grief.

And that’s the important subject we’ll be exploring for the next few weeks.

What’s really behind all that grief pain?

When you’re deep into grief, unspeakable pain is your constant companion. No matter what you do, it seldom lets up. You just know the pain is never going to go away; you’re going to have to live with this the rest of your life.

If someone tries to tell you things will eventually get better, you don’t see how that’s possible. You don’t believe them. And you may be angered that they even made the comment.

It’s true, though. Things do and will get better—if you can identify the sources of emotional energy contributing to all that pain.

While there are some deaths—like grandparents, friends, and even siblings—that we can rebound better and more quickly from, other deaths leave us paralyzed and stuck.

The key is asking the right questions to identify what’s causing the emotions and then providing answers to those questions.

Key grief recovery questions—

We all look back over relationships and ask ourselves internal questions about them. The answers can help us complete the grief healing process.

One key question to ask yourself is:

What makes this death or loss different from others?

Was there something about the relationship that made it special? Was there “unfinished business” that will never be completed?

And we can go further with other important questions, like:

Are there things you wished would have been different about the relationship?
What could have been better?
Was there something more you would have liked to see fulfilled?

In my case, in the death of my daughter during an emergency delivery in the fifth month of pregnancy, I had a lot of emotions.

I’d spent five months with my daughter as she grew in my body, feeling her move. And I was seriously ill with morning sickness soon after the beginning of the pregnancy—so ill I couldn’t keep food down and had to undergo home IV therapy and intra-muscular anti-nausea treatment shots.

But I recovered from that and was just starting to enjoy the second trimester when tragedy struck, and our precious Victoria had to be taken too soon to survive outside my womb.

For a little over five months, I’d focused on my growing baby, wondering about what the baby would be like. Wondering if the little one was a boy or girl. Dreaming. Making plans. Mentally designing the nursery.

Then one night it all abruptly ended. My dreams and hopes were snatched away.

One of the things I wrote on the death announcements I sent out was: “Our dreams are certainly going to miss her—“

And that’s where I could have started the grief recovery process, writing down what I wished had been different, better or more.

Of course, I wish it didn’t turn out the way it did. That Victoria wouldn’t have died, or I would have been able to carry her further into the pregnancy and given her a better chance at life.

I wish I had better medical care. That the doctors would have responded to my concerns and to the concern of the ultrasound technician who picked up the problem during an examination. I wish they had been more concerned about the baby and me than the money they were trying to make and save.

I wish I could have had more time with her after her birth.

Victoria’s death had abruptly ended my hopes, dreams and expectations for our life together, as mother and daughter, and for our family’s life as a foursome. It killed my dreams of having a little girl to dress in frilly dresses and hair pinned into pigtails.

It’s important to remember that all these questions are critical to explore because hopes, dreams, and expectations happen in all relationships—even relationships that struggled or fell short; the ones that weren’t so great.

When we speak of grief, and grief recovery, we need to use these grief recovery terms:

“different, better, more;” and

“broken hopes, dreams, and expectations.”

They need to become part of our grief recovery language.

Communicating your grief—

When you’re first thrown into the grieving process, the emotions and myriad of them seem overwhelming and suffocating. You don’t know what to do with all the painful, sometimes incoherent thoughts.

In order to heal and recover, we need to be able to identify and communicate what’s going on within us. What the source is behind those complex feelings and thoughts.

When we do that, we gain control and reclaim a sense of purpose in life.

We can say to ourselves: I know how I feel. Now what do I need to do about it?

And that’s what we’ll be exploring in the next several weeks of posts.

What we can do about those feelings.

Invitation—

Is there any grief you feel you haven’t worked through or fully recovered from? Would it help to ask these questions we’ve covered today:

What feelings am I experiencing about this grief and why?

What makes this loss different from others I’ve experienced?

What do I wish would have been different?

What could have been better?

What did I want more of?

I encourage you to start exploring those questions and jotting down answers to them. You might be surprised at what you learn, and what relief you gain from the process and learning.

I encourage you to explore and ask yourself these questions. To become actively engaged in moving forward into grief recovery.

NEXT WEEK we’ll look at incomplete grief, what it is and how to avoid living with it.

Until then, remember that the grief process is normal, and that there can be a full life on the other side of it.

Blessings,

Andrea

Andrea Arthur Owan, M.S., A.T., R., is a fitness pro, award-winning inspirational writer and senior-ordained chaplain. She works and writes to help people recover from trauma, grief and loss and to live their best lives — physically, emotionally, and spiritually.