This meeting is about looking at our grief journeys and how we move through our grief and grieving and a few general “elements” of our journeys that we may find and experience along the way. I’ve mentioned these things piecemeal in past meetings so I thought it would be good to put that all together here for those who haven’t heard them or who want to see them in a broader context. 

There are other ideas here that we can try to use to help our healing, no matter where we are in our journeys. They can perhaps help to guide us and remind us of ways to be as mindful as possible as we travel. They are about starting to see our grief journeys not only as a time of pain and sadness to possibly be rushed through or avoided but more hopefully as a time of healing, growing and learning. Again, I’ve mentioned some parts of this at times in other meetings but I want to talk about it all here in hopes that it has more impact when it’s all together in one discussion.

Definitions of some terms:

Hope:A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. Grounds for believing that something good may happen. To want something to happen or be the case. Hope can be a part of our entire journey as we look forward towards healing and wellness and to what they contain and when we can get there. We may also hope that some day, we will reach an end to our grief….

Healing:The process of becoming sound or healthy again. To alleviate a person’s distress or anguish. To correct or put right an undesirable situation. To restore a person to spiritual wellness.

Healing implies an active, ongoing process, a change through time where an unwell aspect of our lives moves toward wellness, perhaps with our active participation. 

Healed implies a completion of the process, a destination we can reach. A place where we can say we’re OK now, we’re done with… (our grief)!

Wellness:The state of being in good health, physically, mentally or spiritually, especially as an actively pursued goal. In grief, wellness is a place where we have found acceptance and healing of what has changed in our lives and moved forward from much of the pain and sadness we have experienced.

Three “elements” of our grief journeys:

In a very general way, our grief journeys contain three very loosely defined “elements”. These are not “stages of grief” that we have to go through in a specific order and at a specific time. They are mostly just ways for us to have some general terms we can use to talk about different groups of things that might be happening to us at different times along the way.

The first “element” is an early grieftime when grief is mostly in control and we mostly have to hang on and ride through it, often in a fog, as best as we can. As we have talked about, mentally, there is often a lot of confusion and disorientation in this early part of our journey and we often have to struggle to do the things we need to do. We also have to struggle to begin to realize and understand that what is happening and what we are feeling is part of our grief and what our grief is doing to us. 

Emotionally, our early grief can often be filled with intense emotional pain, loneliness and sadness. It can be filled with inertia and sometimes with a strong desire to avoid and deny what is happening to us because of how badly we feel.

Gradually, with time and as we work on it, we can slowly begin to build some healing. We can slowly start to learn to navigate our grief and grieving with some intent and purpose. This second “element”, that we can perhaps call healing and reconstruction, usually makes up the longest part of our journeys. 

When we’re ready, healing and reconstruction is the part of our journeys where we usually do the most work as we move forward in our lives. It’s also probably best if we don’t just wait it out, we are probably better served by being willing to give healing and reconstruction our active and ongoing attention!

In the healing and reconstruction part of our journey, we can come to understand that, as we said at an earlier meeting, grief is like a serious injury or surgery; it is painful, it takes time to recover and there is often a long period of rehab that we have to go through. Just as we don’t heal quickly from a major physical injury, we begin to see that we can’t expect to heal from a shattered life and the grief we feel quickly either.

In this “element” we begin to understand that we will need to learn to heal from our grief and not avoid it. It is a part of our journey when we start to find ways to learn some skills and to find some meaning and purpose that will help us reconstruct our lives. 

We can begin to have more success recognizing and working on inertia and finding ways to stop looping thoughts about the past. It is a time when we begin to find healthy ways to start to let go of the parts of our past and our grief that may be holding us back or that we may have finished working through. There may be some elements of “reinventing ourselves” that fit in here as well.

At some point, as we learn to accept the things and the changes that have happened in our lives, a third “element” slowly evolves in our grieving where our healing and the work we have done, gradually leads us to wellness and we begin to actively and purposely live in the next part of our lives.

In many ways, finding healing and wellness from and within our grief and grieving is what this is all about. Finding our way through the emotional pain and sadness caused by the loss of our loved ones into a new and emotionally healthier part of our lives going forward requires a lot of work and our accommodating a lot of changes. But in the end, we may be rewarded for our work by finding ourselves living again in a new way and with a new, though different, light in our lives.

We will all probably experience at least some parts of what is in each of these “elements” in some fashion along the way. They will probably all be part of how we move forward through our grief journeys. They may occur separately or together and they can often overlap as one or another of them becomes more dominant along our paths. 

In this way, our grief journeys can contain a kind of “overlapping continuum” of growth and change that progresses through each “element”, from early grief through healing and reconstruction to wellness.

The “elements” of our grief journeys can appear differently and at different times for each of us. They come in their own time and last as long as they last. If you are actively working on your grief and healing as well as the “rehab” that lives within reconstruction, they may come earlier in your journey…. or not. But there are really no rules, timing or judgements to any of it. When and if they happen for you, that’s when and if they happen….

Some “Zen of Grief” ideas and some Impatience:

If what we do in our grief is concentrate and focus on reaching the destination, on being healed and being done with our grief, instead of concentrating on the journey and the gradual healing we find along the way, we may well be focused on (quickly) trying to reach a possibly unreachable goal or we may find ourselves trying to avoid our grief and the pain it contains in some way. 

It’s ok to have a goal and a vision of the end of the journey but it’s also important to learn to be flexible and allow what we might plan to have happen along the way to change as things we don’t know or don’t expect show up in our grief and grieving. Perhaps our goals can be more temporary or restricted to smaller segments of our grief journeys instead of having a “grand goal” for the entire journey that we feel we have to follow and reach. Improvising during our grief journeys may become a powerful tool to help us navigate the twists and turns along the braided river of our grief.

If, as we go, we can find a way to not count the days, weeks, months or even years of our journey, we can learn not to worry about how long we’ve been on the road and then we can live our journey as it happens and learn from what we find along the way… In life, we often see more when our gaze is focused on what is around us and where we put our feet rather than when our gaze is focused someplace out in the distance.

If we let ourselves focus on the end of the road instead of what’s on the road along the way, we may find ourselves just wanting to reach that end, to reach the top of the mountain so to speak, perhaps just because it is the top or the peak or the “prize” waiting at the end of the road. Perhaps we seek the mountain top because we feel that if we get there, it might then be the end of the many difficult and often painful things we are experiencing in our grief. We may just want to get there as quickly as possible, skip all that “painful stuff” along the way and be done! Or, perhaps that’s just how we are and creating and seeking goals is in our nature or our training and that’s ok too. 

If however, we aren’t concentrating on what the journey contains, on what our grief may teach us and on what it may require of us, we may become impatient to get to an end. I’ve had people tell me, especially fairly early in their journeys, that they were in a hurry to get through their grief and “get done with it” as soon as possible. They were tired of the pain and the inability to function as they might want to and they wanted to get through it, be done with it and leave it behind them as quickly as they could. They wanted to be healed! They really didn’t like the scary idea that they might have to grieve for years… (Remember the first time you heard someone at a support meeting say they were still grieving 3-4 or more years into their journey).

Later on in our journeys, when it has been “years” perhaps, impatience to reach an end to the journey can overtake us again as well. Grief and grieving can be such a long and difficult process that the longer it goes on, the more likely it is that we will want to have it be over. 

Grief is a journey, not a destination. More “Zen”:

The things we encounter and experience throughout our grief journeys aren’t a destination in themselves, they are just part of our movement forward towards a different part of our lives. We may or may not ever reach that end place, we may or may not ever be healed, but we may learn, we may grow, we may reach a new equilibrium and find a peaceful place to live within ourselves where we may find wellness.

Do we ever fully heal? That’s a “TBD”; we have to first take the journey to find out. And I wonder, does it even really matter if we do become healed or is it what we learn on the journey that’s important in what the next part of our lives look like? What If we are focused on experiencing our grief and all it contains, and then we just wake up one day and find that our grief is gone and so we are healed…..

So, how long does it last? How long does the journey go on?

It takes as long as it takes! It goes on for as long as it goes on! As we’ve talked about before, there is no timetable or calendar to grief. Grief and healing progress at their own pace that is different for each of us. If we are mostly present in our travels and we deal with things as they happen to us, if we focus on the journey moment by moment and not on some unknowable or unreachable ending or on ignoring it or avoiding it in some way or that we have to be done by a certain date, we can perhaps more easily learn to find and recognize healing and wellness as they appear along the way.

One thing that seems to be a constant within our grief journeys however, is that our grieving does indeed change with time and our grief and grieving change us through time. Usually, especially if we face it and work at it, our grief becomes less severe, we learn and grow and move forward through it, each in our own way and at our own pace towards healing and wellness.

But grief is a journey, we talk about our grief journeys all the time! By taking that journey as it comes, by surrendering to our grief as we experience it, we can find ourselves learning to accept just where we are at each moment along the way, we can find healing in each moment as it comes to us as well.

So, from that perspective, what is healing, what does it look like in our grief journeys?  

What are we trying to accomplish: 

As I’ve seen it, as time goes by, we start to live more in the present and dwell less on the past. As we come to accept the changes in our lives, we come to allow life and living to take over. We also allow grief to recede as we become more and more comfortable with how we are creating new ways to live, with the new ways we are finding to do things and with the people we are finding to accompany us as we build the next part of our lives. 

As time goes on, the emotional pain and our need to hold on tightly to the past begins to lessen and we find less and less reason to try to avoid the pain and sadness that our early grief contains. We slowly begin to recognize and then find ways to let go of the habits of sadness or avoidance that we may have (unknowingly) embraced during our grieving.

We also become more able to hold the memories of our lives with our loved ones in a place that becomes less painful as time goes by. We can learn to see our lives with our loved ones as they actually were without our grief turning all of our memories sad and dark. We can come to find a place that honors our loved ones and the love and lives we shared with them, a place where we recognize that who we are now will always contain what we learned and shared with our loved ones. And in that way, we can come to see that they will always be part of us, forever.

I think healing and wellness ultimately includes finding an equilibrium between our past lives with our loved ones and the next part of our lives without them. But in our grief, healing does not mean forgetting!

Questions:

Do you think that actively working on finding healing and/or wellness would help to accelerate or smooth the process? How might it do that?

**What do you hope for as your bereavement goes forward? Do you feel that those hopes are realistic?

**What do healing and wellness mean to you in the sense of your grief?

**What would you like to learn or experience that would make you feel like you were healing?

**Looking back to the beginning of your journey, do you think you are healing?

**Can you imagine wellness and if so, what does it, (will it) look like to you?

Others ?