grief & loss
When we hear of grief, we often think of death and dying. Grief isn’t just about death though. It’s about loss and change. We grieve the death of our loved ones, the end of relationships, the role we once had, “the person we thought they were,” the loss of a job, when people don’t show up in a way we need them to, a new health diagnosis and the loss of health, and loss of independence.
We often hear of the five “stages” of grief - denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. It’s important to recognize, although we experience these stages in our grief, the stages are not linear; they occur in no particular order, and they’re ongoing. Grief often comes in “waves,” where we hit a peak with our grief, experiencing the grief very intensely, then for a while there’s a lull, where the grief doesn’t sting quite so much. Grief looks and feels differently over time.
We may experience anticipatory grief, where we know a particular outcome is inevitable. We may also experience complicated grief, when the “symptoms” of grief are intense and long-lasting. And, very commonly, we experience the confusion of grief, where we experience the unfair, hard-to-wrap-your-mind-around experience of being so deeply sad about a loss, and happy of something new, all at the same time. This is often where guilt creeps up, where we begin a journey of learning how to forgive ourselves for not knowing what we didn’t know at the time, and forgiving others, not for their benefit, but for our own.