This is one I wanted to do for a long time so let's see if I can get it right.
Grief is personal.
Grief is 'bespoke'.
Grief is mysterious.
Grief is difficult to understand.
It seems that grief is a complex interaction between what we feel now and what we did then, what we experienced in the past, how we think we're going to feel in the future, what we've lost, what we didn't use as much as we wanted, regrets of things we'd wish we'd done.
The most challenging part of grief, though, is that it's individualised; that's why it makes it so difficult to handle it as a couple or a group instead of an individual.
Grief travels in different directions and at different speeds for different people. Sometimes to the left and fast for you, sometimes to the right and slow for them and then it switches.
In a moment when you feel a little better, you can't understand why they don't; in a moment when they feel a little bit worse, they can't understand why you feel better.
There's no antidote to this, no formula, no recipe to exit grief; sometimes it's important to understand that some of us will never lose the grief that we have for some things; we will just walk side by side with it forever, always feeling that it's likely that at any moment the feeling in her chest will return.
Understanding that must be the only significant weapon we have to help to counter this terrible enemy.
Knowing that someone is at a different speed in a different direction than you doesn't mean they don't care or that they do care more; it doesn't mean that they didn't love the thing that you've lost any more or any less it's just that the speed, the direction for them is different right now, that's what we have to understand.
The other thing is that we must understand that we cannot 'cure' grief in someone else; cure it for our convenience so that everyone can move on to happily ever after.
Perhaps it is better to understand that sometimes the only thing we get to do with grief is to sit in the mud with someone who is in the mud, not speaking, not understanding, just being, just sitting.
Blog Post Number - 4121
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