Welcome. You have just been enrolled in a class that you didn’t want to join. You will learn things you had hoped you would never have to know. There is no teacher, no textbooks and no timeline has been given.
This knowledge and this experience will make you a stranger to those who know you, including yourself. You are a student of your grief and there is so much for you to learn.
In what will feel like a very short period of time, you will be expected to master:
1. How to make your grief more comfortable for those around you
2. The tasks and household duties once handled by the deceased (if applicable)
3. When is the “right” time to clean out your loved one’s belongings
4. A daily routine that will feel totally foreign as it no longer includes the person who died
5. Going to work, the grocery store, car mechanic, dry cleaners, pharmacy, hardware store, while the world continues to turn, even though there seems no sense to any of it
6. How to maintain connections and relationships to friends and family, even if feeling misunderstood, isolated and alone
7. Functioning each day while getting almost no sleep each night
8. How to plan your day, organize life and activities and remember everything (birthdays, where you put your purse, or parked the car) all while feeling scattered, fuzzy-headed and out of sorts
9. A future that has changed in every way, and become what you never pictured it would be, since your loved one has died.
And the final lesson you’ll find at the other end of this (if you look hard enough) is:
10. How to hope.
Hope for a future where things make sense again. Hope for a time when there won’t be such an acute pain of grief following you wherever you go. Hope for a return to the rest of society - to that place of plans and to the comfort of trivial concerns.
As a graduate of this grief lesson, there is potential to see life with a new perspective. To feel gratitude to those who reached out and cared. To see in yourself a strength and resilience that you never knew was there.
And there is the lesson of hope, that can only be found as we do the work of grieving in our hardest and darkest of times.
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