Whatever constructive things we do as early as we can during our grief journeys can set the stage and give us a strong base on which to build during the healing processes to come. Our approach to healing can play a large role in how our healing and our grief journey as a whole progresses as we reconstruct our lives. 

Grief and our grief journeys can, and maybe should, lead us to deeply look at ourselves and at the relationships we had with our loved ones and that we now have with others. We have a lot of time to be introspective if we choose to be and in that sense, I believe that we have a strong need to try to understand what is happening to us as we grieve and as we heal. 

Here are two ideas that may help us as we address ways to find healing and wellness and we try to understand and navigate the changes we are going through in our grief and grieving.

Turning our Grief into Gold… An idea for growth and healing: 

As a reminder of an important underlying idea we’ve talked about at other meetings, please try to remember that we are not our grief! We are separate from our grief, it is something that is happening to us and not who we are. Please also consider that while grief and all its components have appeared suddenly in our lives, they can also eventually diminish or leave when it is time for them to go.

I think that one of the saddest and most difficult things that happened to me in the first year or two of my grief journey, was that my memories of my life together with Andi turned into feelings of sadness and longing that often contained a bleak emptiness whenever my thoughts turned towards the past. My memories of our time together took on a darkness as everything in my life seemed to be overlain and shadowed in shades of gray by my grief and grieving. Thinking about anything from our past, good or bad, just made me deeply sad and often triggered grief waves that took me over and set the tears flowing.

And not just for me but for many of us, when we look toward the past, there is often a triggering of our grief that can send waves crashing over us that are full of a dark sadness and “missing you” in almost every instance. 

But what if we can learn to turn our “Grief into Gold ”?

As part of our healing journeys, can we eventually learn to find ways to change those feelings, can we find ways to not have the memories of our lives with our loved ones constantly trigger our grief? Can we learn, as we heal and grow, to think of our loved ones and our lives together and remember the good times, the special moments and even the bad times, not through the dark smokey lens of our grief, but as clear memories of who and what we actually were and what we actually did? Can we slowly learn to not let our past and all it contained continue to be shadowed by illusions of grief and sadness?

As I often asked myself over and over, especially in the first year of my journey and as a way of expressing what I was feeling and the goals I was establishing for going forward towards creating healing: can I learn to turn my grief into gold? Can I learn to step outside my grief somehow and not let it continue to be a constant trigger for sadness as I look at the past? It became a powerful mantra and driving force for my healing journey.

If I could begin to learn to do that, maybe I could start to be able to remember my life together with Andi as it had actually been. Maybe then the memories of our life together would regain their richness and brightness. Maybe then I could remember it as the life it truly was, as the life we truly lived, without the filter of my grief surrounding it. Maybe I could learn to again find the joy in my memories of our life.

Going forward:

As we begin to find healing, can we somehow start to find a way to see our loved ones, who they were, what they meant to us and how our shared lives built and created who we are now, in a way that isn’t altered by grief into sadness and maybe at some point, doesn’t include sadness and grief at all? Can we have the memories of our lives together and all they contained move into a place not made colorless by grief but that is no less important and powerful without the grief? 

Can we see our shared space and all that is in it, all the treasures and the memory objects it contains and find a way to let those too regain the beauty and light they once brought us. Can we find a way to once again see them and be surrounded by them and let them not trigger sadness and longing or loneliness and grief? Can we let them again be the treasures they were and let them remind us of all we had instead of all we seem to have lost. Can we regain the joy of our memories of the moments in our lives that those objects represent and the emotions and times we spent together gathering or creating those treasures. 

Can we somehow find ways to let the shroud of our grief thin over time, so that instead of a dark and heavy cloak, it can become the thinnest silky veil of mist that reminds us but doesn’t weigh us down, that allows us to be uplifted by the past and the moments of memory we hold of our love instead of feeling blinded, saddened and made ponderous by heavy, leaden feelings of grief. 

Can we find ways to begin to see the light behind the clouds covering the past and see the promise that some day, some time, some how, the clouds might actually part and some golden light will come back into our lives. Can we begin to let the sun shine again on our lives and memories and learn to welcome it as we let the darkness pass and our grief turns to gold. 

Some thoughts to help us:

Each time we feel a wave of grief, instead of seeing and feeling the illusions created by our grief that sit on top of our memories, can we somehow stop and remember the truths of our lives together with our loved ones as they were? Each time we look at a shared treasure, can we shift our thoughts, can we somehow shift our emotions, to help us remember that those treasures often represent golden moments we spent together and that those things were part of our love and that our love didn’t end just because our loved ones aren’t here with us any more. Can we learn to remember that the passing of our loved ones doesn’t alter the past or change the beauty of the moments we recall and the joy we took in the things we created and shared. 

Can we learn to remember our life as it was. Can we slowly learn to switch the dialog in our heads to one of remembered joy instead of illusions of sadness. Can we help tame the intensity of our grief by seeking the true memories we hold behind the veil of our grieving and when we are ready, learn to not let our grief continue to alter how we remember our lives or the love we continue to hold. Can we let our moments of memory hold emotional truths and not the altered version of our lives and feelings that our grief makes us want to remember it being.

Finding Meaning and Purpose as we Restructure our Lives

The next part of this discussion is about some more mostly mental/emotional parts of grieving and healing that we may want to consider. Although it can be a difficult thing for many of us to do, it might be important to think about how we might find ways to build some emotional foundations for the future. 

A loss of meaning and purpose is something most spouses and partners experience as a significant part of their grief. At some level, our spouse or partner and our love for each other was central to all the meaning and purpose we had in our relationship and in our lives. The lives we led, the things we did, the plans we made and the dreams we dreamed were the basis of much of what was meaningful throughout our shared time together.

Since our shared meaning and purpose has been taken from us, as part of the healing process, it can be important for us to find a way to redefine meaning and purpose for ourselves alone. As we build the next chapter in our lives, it’s important for us to identify, learn how to create and learn how to use a new meaning and purpose to guide us, to help fill the empty places in our lives, and to give us reasons to live again. It’s a strong part of the healing process to begin to find ways and reasons to move forward in our lives and possibly, to find what we can dedicate ourselves to that will give us reasons to go on as well.

It may take us a long time just to identify what a new meaning and/or purpose might look like for ourselves alone and it might take even longer to make that new meaning and purpose part of who we are going forward. But we may also learn some interesting things to help us grow as we try to figure it out.

Unfortunately, as with many parts of grief and the reconstruction process, there isn’t an easy or straight forward answer that everyone can use. There is no universal map or rule-book (that I can find) to tell us how to find meaning and purpose… We all have to find our own way and our own meaning and purpose as and when we can. 

At some point, we will have to figure out ways to identify and create what we want and who we want to be in our lives now and along with that, find a new meaning and purpose for ourselves that is probably going to be different from what it looked like during our lives with our loved ones. 

It might be good to begin the adventure of the next part of our lives by defining the framework we want it to grow upon. It may take lots and lots of self examination and questioning as well as a lot of trial and error to see if we can find things that would be meaningful to us at this point in our lives. We also might consider that it could be an important thing to do and that as we go, we will have to do it without our loved ones now as well. Then we have to slowly find ways to bring those things into our lives and make them part of who and what we are. Nothing easy about that at all!

Questions:

• Can you see how grief has overshadowed and altered your memories of your life?

• Can you see how it would be possible to change your internal dialog to help you remember your life as it truly was?

• How would you do that?

• How can we convince ourselves to remember our truths when our grief is creating illusions?

• What techniques can you think of to help you do this?

• Do you think it would be worth finding a way to actively work on turning your grief to gold?

• Have you felt the loss of meaning and purpose in your life?

• Does the lack of meaning and purpose make it hard to find reasons to do things?

• Does the lack of meaning and purpose make it hard to find constructive things you want to do?

• Do you think that the loss of meaning and purpose is significant in keeping you from wanting to move forward in your life?

• Can you begin to think of ways to create new meaning and purpose?

• How can you find what those new meanings and purposes might look like and be?

• What might you do to help you find them?

• How do you define meaning and purpose now?

• How can you begin and continue to actualize a new meaning and purpose in your life once you find it?