Power Grieving

Grief is something everyone will encounter in his or her life. There is no singular way to get through it. In fact, grief is never the same twice, even for the same person. Depending on when, how, and with whom is involved; grief can vary greatly with each occurrence. As with all of us that have been through it, people in my life spoke up with what I “needed to do.” There were echoes in my head from my past that surfaced telling me to “Buck Up” and “Move on.” There were also those telling me that I could cry as long as I needed and it might never get better. As it turns out, every one was right, AND everyone was wrong. As with all things human, it turned out that balance was the most important element in my survival.

All of the advice I had been given had a place in my finding my way forward through my grief. My grand parents were immigrants, who came from very large families, where it was common for several of their brothers or sisters to not survive past childhood. They were told to “Buck up,” and put it behind them. When I was young, if something bad happened, that was what I was told I had to do, “Stop whining and put it behind you.” Of course today we know that people who don’t deal with their grief, acknowledge the pain, or allow themselves to feel the heartache, will one day have their grief return and reek havoc on their lives when they need it least. Grief is not something that can be ignored. It must be dealt with. We all know people that become shut down emotionally and destroy all the relationships in their lives because they choose to stop feeling altogether. It is important that we recognize that is a choice. And it can be a disastrous choice when grieving if one wishes to eventually be able to move forward with their lives. I consider myself lucky that I knew suppressing my feelings was not the way to go. I allowed my tears to flow openly, and for the lack of a better phrase, I wallowed.

Wallowing though is not the perfect answer either, it’s easy to lose yourself by indulging in your sadness too much as well. Tears are a necessity, and crying is unavoidable. We all hear from the “experts” that we need to feel our loss so that we can integrate it into our lives and eventually move forward. But wallowing for too long in your heartache can be a slippery slope, a whirlpool of sadness that threatens to suck you under the waves of depression, down to a depth of despondency where one may never resurface. We must see that this too, is a choice. Now, that’s not to say that there is a timetable on your grief. We all need to wallow for a while, and sadness never really disappears from our lives after a catastrophic loss. At some point in time though, and here in lies the hard part, we have to choose to move forward with our lives, knowing that we have been wounded deeply and may never fully recover. We have to choose to be proactive and attempt, no matter how impossible it seems, to take steps to take our lives back.

This is perhaps the hardest moment we all face in the grieving process. Finding the gumption to begin living again, and not to simply survive. It is the most daunting task we face, and takes by far the most courage. It is “courageous” because up until that point in the grieving process, everything that has occurred has happened to us. We didn’t choose to lose our loved ones, we didn’t choose to feel like our worlds had been turned upside down, but if we want to find a way forward we have to take a risk, and exert considerable effort. My wife and I were discussing this today, and the interesting thing to us was that in retrospect it felt like there was a “window” for that to happen. That window is different for everyone of course, and it was different for each of us, but looking back we felt like if we had missed our windows, we may have extended our sadness and we may have fallen into a spiral of depression.

Making the choice, of course, was no guarantee that everything was going to be fine and dandy. The fact is that after that choice was made there were good days and bad days, at first, way more bad than good. But it was a process of moving forward. It was during these days I discovered that my grandmother’s mantra of “Buck Up” had some virtue to it. Being able to recognize when I needed keep control of my emotions as best I could was important because the world around us expected us to get “Back to normal.” This necessity of needing to “hold it together” led me to the realization that practicing “Power Grieving” had great value. What exactly is “Power Grieving?” I define it as the art of finding the time in your life to really dive into your sadness. One of the best things I was told early on in my grief was to “lean into” the grief when it comes. “Power Grieving” is just that, leaning into the sadness, and taking the time to dig deep into your grief and let it express itself, but on your terms. I found it was possible to hold back the extreme feelings of heartache much of the day as long as I gave them time to surface later when I was prepared to let them run their course. Often this would be after I dropped my daughter off at school, or when I was in my car listening to music. In those times I allowed the grief full access, and I let it exploded however it chose to explode. Yelling and screaming at the universe became one of my favorite pastimes. Surprisingly, after the storm of emotions had passed, I felt better, and relieved. It wasn’t complete, and it didn’t last forever, but it allowed me to focus a bit more on moving forward.

There was no magic weapon that saw me through to the road forward. Often I did not want to deal with real life, but I found that sometimes you had to “Buck up” and “Fake it until I made it.” It might sound easy to those who have not been there, but it was not. It took hard work, and dedication to wanting to regain control of my life. It meant choosing to move forward, and refusing to let grief ruin my life more than tragedy already had. It took balance between wallowing in my emotions and suppressing my emotions. And it took dealing with my emotions on my terms with the art of “Power Grieving.”