I’ve been challenged over the past few months to confront fear and anxiety. I have had the pleasure of unexpected visits from hope, signing off my last blog with this apt description of my current state – finitely human and infinitely hopeful. But, the journey continues. In a recent appointment, my therapist brought up a new aspect. She asked, “What does grief look like to you?”
I responded with a helpful distant stare, while thinking, “It looks like something I don’t want to talk about.” Needless to say, I have more appointments scheduled.
Since then, I have been trying to mold a blog post for practically a month now, using this medium as a way of untangling what grief looks like to me (thank you for indulging my cathartic exploration). Usually, I sit down, vomit on the screen, then walk away for a day or two before returning to refine the words and then post. But grief…I’m painfully wrestling with this one. So, I turned to a familiar friend of mine in times of uncertainty – research. I asked Dr. Google. One of the first suggestions came from the esteemed Mayo Clinic. Their experts describe grief as “…a strong, sometimes overwhelming emotion.”
Again, a distant stare. Um, doesn’t that seem a bit vague?
More research quickly uncovered the revered “stages” of grief (post to follow on how certain words trigger – spoiler alert, “stages” is one of them). As a math person, I get the trend and desire toward the measurement and application of patterns to our existence. Civilization is replete with such utilizations from our literal measuring systems (plural because for some reason America prefers a system based on random numbers instead of a base 10 model, but whatever), to our calendar, and the way we proportion our presence on this planet in reference to celestial bodies. Humans need to measure things.
Grief feels similar, measured somehow. I have lost people I love, but I have never lost a child, or a spouse, or a best friend. My tangible existence has never been consumed by fire or whisked away in a tornado. I feel like I’ve been a mere spectator to those levels of loss. More measurement, accompanied by the realization, I don’t feel adequate to write about grief, coupled with the challenge of dealing with something I cannot name or define. (I may have mentioned this before).
Grief feels like the giant elephant in the room that appears when someone looks at you and declares you are now a cancer patient. Maybe dealing with the smaller pieces feels like a tangible way to address the elephant. After all, that’s the best way to eat it right? One bite at a time? And maybe I currently only have the capacity to deal with the “smaller” things? (More topics for upcoming therapy appointments).
While we seem to accept the idea that some things are just spectrumie (definition “somewhere on the spectrum”), like light for example, we struggle in that space between things that can be measured and things that have span – beginnings and endings beyond what we can see or define.
Maybe that’s grief?
At the risk of sounding flippant, I think grief is like that horse in “The Wizard of Oz”. You know the one that changes color? Sometimes it’s green, then it changes to yellow and then blue, without measure or pattern. A spectrum of color that represents how quickly we move from one feeling to another. But like light, there are some pieces that feel invisible, outside the realm of the seen – felt deeply but challenging to define or describe.
Maybe grief isn’t even an emotion?
I realized recently cancer is not actually my teacher. Prof C simply opened a door in my being to a room full of mirrors that provide opportunity to look at myself in ways I would never have chosen. A sort of House of Mirrors, but in this case, the distortion is the reality. I get to see how short and squatty my love can be, or how twisted and grotesque my anxiety is.
Maybe grief is like more like a door?
A door that propels you into a room of emotion and sadness and loss that cannot be experienced any other way. But honestly, I don’t know. And based on the definition provided by the Mayo Clinic, maybe it’s beyond easy definition.
We measure our lives by counting the boxes on a calendar. Some are filled with appointments, errands, meetings, chemo chairs – moments that gauge the productivity of our days and our accomplishments. In that frame of measurement, it’s easy to lose sight of the experience – the small spectrum of visible life we can see in the greater vastness of existence that begins and ends in the unknown.
I’ve committed to stand in this room, opened by Prof C, eyes open, looking at the iterations of myself I’ve created or allowed. Maybe I can change some of them, but maybe that isn’t the point either. Maybe this is a chance for me to experience and embrace the finiteness of my specific flavor of humanity. To learn to practice measuring days in things not tangible – the more spectrumie bits like joy and love and presence in between the measured notches on my calendar.
And maybe grief is giving myself permission and space to feel the losses, to wrestle, and hopefully, at the end of it all, accept what I cannot define. Maybe.
Rebecca, what a beautiful, painful, testimonial of this journey! I remember exactly where I was and how it felt the first time my doctor used that C word in my life. I felt as if I was Dorothy in the tornado of my life. There were no words, no coherent thoughts, only the very large question mark that lived in my brain, that actually didn’t want to hear any of the answers. The second time, many decades later, was not much better. But, after moments of numbness, the inner woman of strength and stubbornness appeared and the next part of my journey began. I discovered I was now a member of a club that no one wants to have membership in, but I also discovered an innate strength within my being that stood with me during the battle. I have chosen not to be a cancer “victim”, but rather a cancer overcomer. With a story on a tee shirt that reads, “Once upon a time there was a girl who kicked cancer’s ass. Is was me….The End”. This is an individual journey, with many beautiful, kind, hope filled, brilliant and loving humans that walk alongside us as we navigate our way through each moment of grief and overcoming. Thank you for allowing us to share in your journey!!
Than you, Judi, for sharing your journey. I love the tee shirt and celebrate with you, the accomplishment of overcoming! Looking forward to the overcoming part myself. Thanks again for sharing!!! Love – R
Grief. Maybe the dictionary calls it an emotion, and I suppose that’s fine. Accurate enough. I’m chiming in with my thoughts not because I think I’m an authority on the subject, but just in case any of it adds a useful boost to your own ponderings. Warning: this will probably get long. Hopefully not longer than your post, but… No disrespect to your blog intended, I’m just wordy and I trust in your love for me. 😉
I think of grief simply as a response. A response to circumstances, events, or even just to our own thoughts. I mean, if I can cry at the death of a fictional character… and even feel lingering sadness over years about it… Then it’s not about some objective measurement. It’s happening in my own head / heart.
My brain tends to analyze and boil things down to their essence. In my observations, life seems to boil down to two responses: fear or faith. And grief, as odd as it may sound at first, falls within this simple matrix. Because at its core, fear seems to be fear of LOSS. And grief, generally, is a response to loss.
As children, we fear loss of security or comfort. Throughout life, we fear losing out on opportunities. Losing things that bring us joy (people, foods, homes, routines, toys, etc). Some of these things we fear are because we experienced the loss ourselves. But some fear comes when we just IMAGINE the loss.
That’s fear. But grief… that’s what happens when we actually experience the loss.
One of the reasons I’ve found grief sneaks up on me is because there are things I don’t usually associate with grief. Like most people, my main association with grief is death. Death of a pet, a child, a parent, a friend, a loved one, or even that aforementioned fictional character or a celebrity I’ve never met but whose work I enjoy.
But what about loss of identity? When I quit my day job to raise my kids, it took me a couple of years to realize that what I was feeling was grief over the loss of my identity in the workplace. Nobody saw me as the technical expert anymore. Nobody recognized me when I solved problems like how to juggle my home routine.
What about loss of a dream? It has taken me a while to realize that I’ve been chasing an unrealistic dream about my storytelling all my life. I felt certain (for some completely unknown and unjustified reason) that I was meant to be the next C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, or more specifically “the Stephen King of light and goodness”. And every moment that I wasn’t pursuing that dream, I was impatient with whatever circumstance I was in. Every moment I was free to pursue the dream, I felt paralyzed by the pressure to live up to it.
Eventually I realized how toxic that was. How it caused me to measure everything in my life the wrong way. But in order to let go of the dream, I had to let it die. And that had its own grieving process. Why? Because of the loss of an imagined future.
I lost the dream of all the books I’d write. The dream of all the impact I’d have. The dream of knowing that my life held meaning. (Of course, it still holds meaning, but since I’d been clinging to the idea of that particular identity and its meaning, it was painful to experience the loss of it.)
And as I’ve watched friends lose their loved ones and their parents, or watched parents lose their children, or watched a dear young author friend lose her beloved young husband while pregnant with their second child… I’ve realized how much of their grief is wrapped up in the loss of the imagined future.
“We’ll never write those books together.”
“I’ll never hold my grandchild.”
“He’ll never walk his daughter down the aisle.”
“We’ll never celebrate our 50th wedding anniversary.”
“She’ll never see her great-grandchildren.”
“I’ll never meet that unborn son–not until heaven, anyway.”
“We’ll never retire to Montana like we dreamed.”
“We won’t grow old together.”
“She’ll miss my high school graduation.”
And the day to day grief of a missing loved one who is close to you seems to be wrapped up in the hole they leave behind. Every interaction you used to have throughout the day is now hollow, empty, nonexistent. A reminder of what’s no longer there. The annual holidays when you’d normally celebrate together now have a missing piece. All the things they used to handle for you are now your own responsibility, whether you’re any good at it or not. The security you had knowing that someone was right there if you needed them… is gone.
To me, that’s grief. It’s the loss of the tangible outside ourselves, the loss of something we mentally found comfort, security, or identity in, and the loss of the imagined future. And honestly, which of those things is more difficult depends on the person and the circumstances.
So yeah, it’s an emotion. But I think the times we don’t experience grief when other people expect us to, it’s because we didn’t have the mental/emotional connection to the loss. Maybe we never had expectations for the future. Maybe we didn’t rely on that person or that job or that circumstance to bring us comfort, security, or joy.
Sometimes it’s because we’re mature in those areas and relying on God instead of some other fleeting thing.
Sometimes it’s because we’re walled off from true intimacy and don’t hold others close, so their loss isn’t so bad.
One preacher I know said that self-centeredness is the source of grief. And honestly… once I thought it through, I had a hard time arguing with that.
It doesn’t mean that grieving people are sinning. Just that the reason they are in pain is because they lost something that they wanted to keep.
Like so many emotions, it’s sooooo important to let the emotion run its course within the proper boundaries, to fully and intentionally participate in the exploration of it while it’s happening. Burying it, ignoring it, denying it, downplaying it — none of those things are useful (except perhaps temporarily, for practical survival).
For me, identifying the source of grief (loss of something we wanted to keep) really helps illuminate my feelings and empowers me to process my grief when it comes.
“What have I lost? What had I imagined for the future that hurts because I now believe it will never happen? Is there any chance that I’m jumping the gun and maybe the thing I imagine that I’ve lost is actually possible to regain?”