The zero stages of grief
I joke I joke. There’s obviously the 6 stages of denial, anger, depression, bargaining and acceptance, ok you know the drill.
This title is really just shark bait (hoo ha ha) mixed in with an earnest attempt to make clear that when it comes to grief, there’s zero chance it’ll look like the next persons.
This matters, because whether you’re Nemo and you’ve experienced loss, or you’re Dory and you’re swimming alongside a friend in someone else’s journey…. Chances are joy and suffering are topics you’ll eventually find yourself in. And so opens up the two biggest words we often pull from our brain in this scenario: The double G, Grief and Gratitude.
I reckon the biggest misconception about the both of them is that they can’t exist together.
And the second biggest, is that if you are still grieving you’re not conquering.
Let’s talk first about how they exist together.
Grief and gratitude aren’t enemies of each other, they’re sisters.
We do live in a bit of a cancel culture, so we need to be aware of how that influences things. I observe this playing out when people try to side with either sister grief, or sister gratitude. Here’s the good news. Neither trumps the other, AND both can exist disproportionately at any given time. Some seasons grieving may come in waves higher than your even keel 50%/50%. That means sometimes you might find grief a lot more present than joy, or vice versa.
I’ve said it before… and i’ll unfortunately say it more than twice, but the reason you’ll often get told you’re either grieving too much or not grieving enough is because people give advice from a place of what has worked for them. And although that’s needed for sure, it ought to be more of a suggestion than a tightly held rule of life.
What’s right for you is different to what’s right for someone else. Here’s a wild thought to simply sit in. What if we didn’t shame either of the G’s and how much or how little we have of either of them? Because what if neither of them were bad?
I’m sure you have your own associations with how you’ve experienced these words in the form of advice from others. I wonder which has felt like a burden for you that you might be longing to be free from?
If anyone has ever experienced that feeling from me, it’s my deep desire to re-write that.
I’m sure you’ve had people tell you how grateful you should be that you don’t “have it worse” Or I’m sure you’ve been told that you’re not sad enough about something, that you “moved on too quickly”.
Firstly… if someone lost an arm and they were grieving that longer than the girl from Soul Surfer does (in the movie anyway)… that doesn’t make them wrong. But imagine that being your story… then imagine having someone tell you “at least you didn’t loose all your limbs”.
WILLLLLD. JUST WILD. YOU WOULDN’T. And yet. We do. Just with things we determine others shouldn’t grieve as hard about.
Similarly for the person that has maybe moved through grief quite quickly… I would never think to tell them they should go back to that dark place and really grieve it right, assuming they didn’t because it doesn’t look like how others grieve that thing.
If that person seems genuinely attached to their lived experience, and authentically feels done with grieving something… who am I to tell them they should grieve more?
So if we wouldn’t do that here, we really shouldn’t do that in either of the G’s. And that means we have to let go of our preconceived ideas about a person who’s suffering “nobly”, how much grief is okay, and how much is not.
I was watching Wandavision (the Marvel TV series) the other day and one of the hugest themes they touch on is grief. Here’s the most profound thing I’ve heard all year.
Wanda: “What makes you think that talking about it would bring me comfort? The only thing that would bring me comfort is seeing him again. Its like this wave washing over me again and again. It knocks me down and when I try to stand up, it just comes for me again, and it feels like it’s just going to drown me.”Vision: “No no it won’t.”
Wanda: “How do you know?”
Vision: “Well because it can’t all be sorrow can it? I’ve never experienced loss because I’ve never had a loved one to loose. But what is grief, if not love persevering?”
It’s love! It crushes us because we have love!
What if grief wasn’t JUST this sad feeling we have when we can’t choose to see the upside of things (i.e. choosing to highlight only joyful things and focusing on this as our truest form of reality). Because really? If we can just see a better reality then maybe the sadder reality won’t hurt as much right?
I think gratitude holds a HUGE place in the basket of our wellness tools, and I experience its help daily. But maybe we’re mistaken to see gratitude as the only way out of grief, by disassociating from the parts of us that are also experiencing a reality that grieves us.
The reason slap stick advice gets given about either one or the other, is likely because holding both together is hard to do. It’s hard to stay present in a reality I could choose to escape from, and if there’s one thing we know well how to do as a society, its escape.
But here’s the thing. What if grief is not something that’s yucky and uncomfortable, or that disconnects us from our “reality”. What if it actually CONNECTS us to our reality. Connects us to an inbuilt reality inside of us…the reality that is love, not yet dying out.
“What is grief, if not love persevering?”
Grieving AS conquering.
We’re only sad about things we care about. This matters when we think about grieving and how much discomfort is felt around it.
If I don’t love something… I don’t care to loose it.
No one’s sitting around crying over the friend they once had, the freedom they once had, the identity, the innocence they didn’t willingly hand over, the rejection they didn’t deserve, the shame they experience, their actions or other's that have wreaked havoc, the wounds they didn’t carry before that event… because they DIDN’T CARE about it.
Loss happens. Not just with people. There’s lots of things we can’t get back. Can’t re-write the past, can’t turn back time, can’t restore what was taken, can’t mend what’s broken. The reason why they hurt is because we loved that thing.
We could choose to become numb and think, oh there’s another another murder, another divorce, another trauma, car accident, lost limb, lost job, broken skin, and broken heart. Another’s safety impinged on, another’s longing for a family, another person struggling for joy, for a future, for shelter, for love. But no. We weren’t meant to become numb!!
I do believe that healing is real, and isn’t that what we’re all aiming for? Like deep deep down do you believe any one is eager to stay in the dark night where their hope and dreams seem lost? No.
There will be a day sweet brother, sweet sister, where freedom reigns and joy isn’t a struggle. I believe that for you, and I believe that for me. But I do also believe that while we wait we need to quit looking at grief as weak, as sacrilegious, as unfaithful, as wrong, as something to move past and push through. And I’d like to suggest another narrative.
When we grieve, we conquer.
We conquer by staying in love, by staying present, by staying attached to the reality that some things just aren’t right and shouldn’t have ever been that way. When it pulls on the love you have (the desire for goodness to prevail) its because deep inside you is an inbuilt picture of heaven, and when it doesn’t look heavenly… it breaks us.
But love persevering is not weak, there’s nothing weak about the endurance that it costs to remain in love. I promise you don’t need to praise harder, shout louder or work harder. No. Right now as I think about the different kinds of grief you all carry… all I see is the immense perseverance it takes to feel! The courage it takes to feel, to not LOOK AWAY, to NOT NUMB, to stay SOFT, to stay PUT, to stay CLOSE, to lean in VULNERABLY, to live and breath as a fully fledged being of love.
Gratitude the beauty that she is… and I do love her. But she is in grief. Not in all situations but maybe in more than we account for. Grief is grief because we once had gratitude for something that is now lost. We were once grateful and once adored the thing we can’t seemingly get back. I think that matters. Because although one comes with a wide grin and usually a positive feeling attached to it, and the other with a lowly face and feeling of mourning attached to it… there isn’t any less gratitude in either of those moments. Because in both grief and gratitude is love.
I guess the last thing I’d like to say is that grief is not the enemy.
Grief isn’t something we try to run from. We need mechanisms help us cope when its really serious and that’s ok. But grief is apart of your inbuilt DNA, human map, and God given design to see goodness flourish in the world. Above all else, to see love flourish. It doesn’t matter whether you go to the ends of the earth and remove yourself from all potential threats to pain. It’ll still be there. That tiny little voice that goes…
“there has to be a better way, there has to be less of this pain, has to be equality, has to be justice, has to be more goodness, more wholeness, more safety, more belonging, more love”.
And we’ll all see how that plays out differently and that’s why we need each other. But my friend, grief and gratitude can and DO exist together. They’re not enemies, they’re friends. And although grief doesn’t have a heroic persona, grief IS CONQUERING. If you know Jesus, this shouldn’t be surprising to you, our man of sorrows looks a lot like grief, not like Captain America.
After all this here’s what my gut tells me. No one ever went backwards because they experienced too much compassion, too much empathy, and too much non-judgmentalism.
No one ever went backwards who had someone safe enough to face the darkness with them. To listen to when they got it wrong and didn’t say things like, “it could be worse” or “you just need more faith”. Who was intuitive enough to assume you’re not trying to keep yourself here. Who was empowering enough to TRUST that the person in pain has all the answers inside of them, knowing that they don’t need to fix it, they just simply need to encourage, love and support them.
“No one in history has died from allowing themselves to feel their emotions. But many people have died in attempts of avoiding them”
People don’t avoid by choice. They avoid because it gets too hard. Because they go unheard, and unseen from the platitudes we slap on to avoid our own fears. And so people stop sharing, stop showing up and stop being vulnerable.
It gets too hard because we don’t know how to get in the pit with each other and grieve. That’s why it matters we become comfortable with our own grief, because if we run from our own we will likely run from others. But! Maybe with a little re-narration we can de-stigmatise grief and reconnect to it, by seeing it for what it is. Gratitude and love.
Love, persevering.
