Finding Meaning: a book by David Kessler
Grief is extremely powerful. It is easy to get stuck in your pain and remain bitter, angry, or depressed. Grief grabs your heart and does not seem to let go.
Ultimately, meaning comes through finding a way to sustain your love for the person after their death while you are moving forward with your life. This does not mean that you will stop missing the one you loved, but it does mean that you will experience a heightened awareness of how precious life is.
To spare oneself from grief at all costs can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. Love and grief come as a package deal. If you love, you will one day know sorrow.
Meaning is the sixth stage of grief, the stage where the healing often resides.
Birds sing after a storm, why should not people feel as free to delight in whatever sunlight remains to them- Rose Kennedy.
"Death does not need to be a catastrophic, destructive thing: indeed, it can be viewed as one of the most constructive, positive, and creative elements of culture and life. Most of us do not experience it that way."
The grieving mind finds no hope after loss. But when you are ready to hope again, you will be able to find it. Bad days don't have to be your eternal destiny. That does not mean your grief will get smaller over time. It means that you must get bigger. As the saying goes, "No mud, no lotus." The most beautiful flower grows out of the mud. Our worst moments can be the seeds of our best moments. They have an amazing power to transform us. Pain, death, and loss never feel good, but they are unavoidable in our lifetime. Yet the reality is, post-traumatic growth happens more than post-traumatic stress.
Each person's grief is as unique as their fingerprint. But what everyone has in common is that no matter how they grieve, they share a need for their grief to be witnessed. That doesn't mean needing someone to try to lessen it or reframe it for them. The need is for someone to be fully present to the magnitude of their loss without trying to point out the silver lining.
It was once common for us to come together as a community to bear witness to the grief experienced when a loved one died. But in our current culture, the mourner is made to feel that though his or her own world has been shattered, everyone else's world goes on as if nothing has changed. There are too few rituals to commemorate mourning, and too little time allotted to it. Grief should unite us. It is a universal experience. Grief is what's going on inside of us, while mourning is what we do on the outside. The internal work of grief is a process, a journey. It doesn't have prescribed dimensions and it does not end on a certain date.
You will never forget that person, never be able to fill that unique hole that has been left in your heart. In time, it will hurt less often and with less intensity. But, it will always be there. Death ends a life, but not our relationship, our love, or our hope. Life gives us pain. Our job is to experience it when it gets handed to us. Avoidance of loss has a cost. Having our pain seen and seeing the pain in others is a wonderful medicine for both body and soul. Life has peaks and valleys. It is our responsibility to be present for both. Repeating the story is often a griever's subconscious way of trying to get much-needed attention. Funerals and memorials are important. Something profound happens when others see and hear and acknowledge our grief. Mourning is the outward expression of our grief. Conversely, something goes wrong when it remains unseen. A funeral is a time for people to gather as a family, as a community, to witness grief together. The funeral is the most well-known ritual for death, a ceremony that creates meaning out of our loved one's experience of life, and our own experience of loss.
We think we can spare our children pain by not exposing them to the reality of death. But the opposite is true. Our children, just like us, are in pain when they lose someone they love, and it will not help them to have their pain glossed over. Going to a funeral will help because they, too, need to have their pain witnessed, to feel it reflected in the emotions of those around them.
The funeral ritual is important in witnessing grief because we will grieve alone for the rest of our lives. This is over last formal time to mourn together. One of the most common things we hear at funerals is that the deceased would not want us to grieve for them. I always think if we can't grieve at the funeral when can we grieve? The funeral is by design a communal time to witness each other's grief through music stories poems and prayers.
We need a sense of community when we are in mourning because we were not meant to be islands of grief. The reality is that we heal as a tribe. When we see our sorrow in the eyes of another, we know our grief has meaning.
Everything that lives must die. But while life has to end, love does not.
Allowing yourself only to focus on the past, however, can seem easier, more comfortable, than deciding to live fully in a world without your loved one. The negative be comforting in its familiarity while deciding to move forward can be frightening because it makes you feel like you are losing your loved one not once, but twice. It is also scary because it requires you to move into the unknown, into a life that is different without that person.
The decision to live fully is about being present for life, no matter how hard life is at the moment. It is about what you are made of, not what happens to you.
We may not know why a loved one died and we remain, but that is the reality. The life that was lost was precious. If we have been granted more time, should not we believe that our life is also precious?
When people grieve a death by suicide, they are inevitably haunted by their failure to have stopped it. Our thoughts betray us and beat us up.
Death by Suicide is not a selfish act or even a choice. It is a sign of a mind that needs help. It is a horrific outcome of a tragic situation.
Separate pain from suffering. Pain is a natural reaction to the death, whether it is by Suicide or any other means, but suffering is what our mind does to us.
In grief, you want to feel that your closest friends and family members are sensitive to your feelings, that they understand your sadness. Many do. And then there are people who always seem to disappoint. You can rail against them as you have every right to do, or you can simply accept them for who they are. That is a choice you have to make, and either is valid.
A wife who loses a husband is called a widow. A husband who loses a wife is called a widower. A child who loses his parents is called an orphan. There is no word for a parent who loses a child. Lose your child and you are... nothing. - Tennessee Williams.
No way of dealing with grief is less legitimate than another. The avoidance of grief will only prolong the pain of grief. Better to turn toward it and allow it to run its natural course. When we move through pain and we release it, we fear that there will be nothing, but the truth is, when the pain is gone, we are connected only in love. Memories are deep sources of comfort to those who are in mourning. As long as someone still cares to remember them, the dead gets to keep “living” in a society that is not so different from the one they left behind. Once they are forgotten in the living world, they disappear.
When someone dies, the relationship does not die with them. You have to learn how to have a new relationship with them.
You are not closing the door on a relationship with the person who died. You don't ever bring the grief over a loved one to a close. You are opening the door to a different relationship.
Remaining connected to your loved one in grief is not "unhealthy grieving."
In the face of a great loss, life goes on. The World keeps spinning, the seasons change, the dead of winter gives way to the rebirth that occurs every spring. Every storm gives way to a clear new day. Despite our losses we continue. We keep moving, taking in another breath. If we are still here when the new day dawns, it is an opportunity to explore the life that our loved ones had to leave behind. Love and life remain within us, and the potential for meaning is always there.
Every moment we are making choices whether to move toward healing or to stay stuck in pain. We can't move into the future without leaving the past.