Grief is painful.
It hurts.
There’s no way around it. In this life there is pain, and the more we try and resist the things we don’t want to feel, the more we suffer.
When my mum passed away, I was only 29 and in the middle of serious health issues that had left me very disabled and restricted.
I’d had a very difficult childhood, and I’d always been incredibly close to my mum – she was the one that knew me.
We talked every day and no topic was off limits.
She’d been sick for just over a year, and as a family we were all caught up in the immense anxiety of the daily doctors appointments, medications, scans, tests and so on, and then one day – nothing. Just silence.
No appointments or scans or options or next steps, just silence, nothing, she just wasn’t there any more. The worst silence of my life.
And so the mind jumps in to fill this pain and this empty space with all sorts of noise and rationalisations and dialog and memories as it frantically tries to find something to make this pain go away, even if only for a moment.
Sometimes we even find ourselves purposely bringing up painful memories simply because it feels better than staring into that vast empty space.
People come to the house saying things like, I’m sorry, try and stay busy, try and remember the good times and so on and they’re trying to help because they have empathy and they see you suffering and they want to try and help you stop suffering in some small way.
But the truth is the pain must be felt.
This is grief, this is life.
By all means distract yourself at times, I did plenty, but know that to heal, the grief must ultimately be felt and processed.
When we resist it, we suffer, and we store it for later, and then we suffer more later and often we suffer into the long term because we don’t allow the cycle to complete and the emotions to be discharged.
Like everything, it will pass, and while the person won’t come back, the grief will pass and be replaced with love and fond memories in time.
