Grief dominates much of my life; I feel it all the time. I have a love/hate relationship with it. I’ve come to view grief differently over the last decade as I’ve experienced it in my own life and focused on it more in my practice. We tend to recognize grief when somebody dies, but I’m not sure we recognize all the other ways we grieve throughout a lifetime.
And then there are all the losses we don’t name: relationships that never become what we hoped they would, friendships that change or disappear, parents who are still alive but may never be able to meet us in the way we want or need them to. There are families we imagined having, careers that didn’t happen, bodies that change, and versions of ourselves that don’t really exist anymore. These losses are ambiguous and often don’t come with a clear ending, which can make them especially confusing.
You may not even realize you’re grieving. You feel unusually tired or angry, or you can’t stop thinking about something you believe you should have gotten over by now. There isn’t necessarily a ritual around these losses either. Nobody brings food when you finally accept that your mother is probably never going to understand you. There isn’t a funeral for the future you thought you were going to have. I personally cannot stand the language of “getting over” loss or “moving on.” It feels dismissive of the sacred, painful experience of loss. I’m not convinced that’s what we do with losses that really mattered to us. They become part of our internal world somehow, and eventually we find a different way of carrying them, integrating them into the fabric of our becoming.
Attachment is woven through a lot of this. We need other people, even when we would rather believe we don’t, and we want to be loved, understood, chosen and important to the people who matter to us. We can spend years trying to get something from a relationship that the other person simply isn’t able to give. We explain ourselves differently, become more accommodating, ask for less, wait. We convince ourselves that if we can just get something right, eventually the relationship will become the one we have been hoping for. There can be a tremendous amount of grief when we begin to accept that it may not. We aren’t only grieving the person in front of us; we are grieving the person we needed them to be. Hope can keep us connected for a very long time
There are other less obvious losses too. Menopause and aging can bring grief, children grow up, friendships change, we leave jobs and homes, and we outgrow identities that once gave us a sense of who we were. Even becoming healthier can involve grief, which seems almost contradictory. The very patterns we’re trying to change may once have given us connection, protection or a place in our families. Drinking is one example. Something can stop working for us and still be hard to let go of.
This is where we can be unnecessarily hard on ourselves. We assume that because something was unhealthy we shouldn’t miss it, or because we made the right decision we shouldn’t feel sad about it. Human beings aren’t this or that. We aren’t tidy. We are messy and complex, and I actually love that about us. I’m much more interested in what a loss means to us, to you and to me. We may be mourning the feeling of being chosen, the idea of family, safety, youth, possibility, or a future we were emotionally invested in. Understanding that doesn’t make grief disappear, but it can make our reactions feel less confusing.
I also don’t believe every loss needs to become a lesson. We put a lot of pressure on ourselves to find meaning quickly, as though pain becomes more acceptable once we can explain what we learned from it. Sometimes it just is, and that can be hard to tolerate. We scramble around looking for the meaning because not having one is uncomfortable. It can feel a bit insulting, really, to bear the pain and then feel as though we are supposed to turn it into wisdom. Sometimes something is simply painful, and we need to be allowed to miss what we miss. What I’ve come to learn is that grief needs somewhere to exist—in our bodies, in our hearts and in our lives. We don’t always need to avoid it or make something of it right away.