When I began my grief journey years ago, I sat there, ready to dive into the depths of the deepest parts of my sorrow. I felt like my little boy, who is learning how to swim, standing on the second step and bracing himself for the unknown as he jumps and submerges himself underwater.
Prior to learning how to swim with grief, it was grief that had taken hold of me. This week, I read this beautiful quotation by C.S. Lewis that explains it perfectly: “No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear. I am not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness…”
Grief is, quite literally, living through our worst fears.
In the past when I’ve been asked to explain grief, I’ve rattled off something about “grief being our emotional and physical response to losing something or someone we loved.” It is that, but it’s also something more.
Something I’ve realized in recent weeks that has shocked me is that grief can be our teacher.
It’s shocking because I almost never think about grief as being anything more than a horrible range of emotions that we need to wade through. Could there be a side to grief I had not explored?
It’s only been in the years since I started my grief journey that I’ve noticed something similar with the people I’ve joined on their grief journey. Grief unfolds the unexpected in people’s lives. It is often very different from what we were expecting. Truthfully, it’s always different than we were expecting. For those who sit and take notice, it seems grief often reveals an insight about themselves.
I believe that our experience of grief is totally unique to who we are. I believe that we struggle to define grief because no one has had an identical experience. There are millions of unique factors that go into our experience of grief, the biggest of all is who we are: our personality, our life, our strengths, our weaknesses.
Before my grief journey, I had struggled significantly with creating boundaries. I had allowed people to walk through and all over my life. I needed help, and I received it from the most unlikely place: My grief cried out for a boundary, and I had to learn, over time, to give it the boundary it was asking for.
Someone else I am walking with is learning self care, something she has always struggled with. Another friend is learning about letting go and not always needing to have control. Still another is learning about grace in radical new ways. All lessons they’ve had because of their experience with grief.
I suppose this is the beauty of being in the role of Grief Coach and not Grief Counselor, or at least not yet. I get to sit with curiosity and look at what living with grief really looks like for someone who wants to move forward. If we sit and think grief is merely waves of uncontrollable emotion then we are overwhelmed before we even begin. If we look at grief with a completely different lens then suddenly we begin to see things we weren’t expecting.
What is one area of grief that you struggle with? What are the characteristics of your grief? What is it calling for? How might grief aid you in a place of deep life transformation?