How to Help a Person in Grief
It is different for everyone. No matter what the situation; when grief is present, the human emotion of suffering loss, it is deep and unexplainable. It is a feeling that can only be shared by those who have lost. Everyone experiences grief on some level and as life goes, it gets deeper and deeper.
Grief is an experience that can only be shared to be understood. The differing levels of how deep the grief can go cannot be understood until you too have felt a loss as deep as the person sitting next to you.
Until you do, just being with the person in grief, feeling love WITH them is the most compassionate support you can give. It takes no words. After Grant died, my whole reality was shattered. I had no idea how to function.
People around me would say, I’m so sorry. Sorry doesn’t change anything and it’s just pity. I don’t like being pitied. I know that people don’t mean it that way. I know that the heart is so good when one says, “I’m sorry.” so please know I feel that.
It doesn’t help, and you know that too. Words cannot be there to feel, only being there feeling. As I reflect back on the first two years after his passing, the moment I would wake up, it felt like I was being torn from the only safe place I knew.
I was torn into the reality of a waking nightmare I could not escape. The moment my eyes opened, I felt terror about what had happened in my life. It wasn’t a dream and I was waking up to a nightmare every morning.
Every morning I woke up with a jolt of adrenaline causing me to feel like I wanted to run. It was if I were running for my life all while my body was unable to get out of bed. At the moment I woke, what I longed for most, was for night to come.
At night I could go back to sleep and escape this pain. But I would have a whole day before me filled with the needs of small people who depended on me. LIttle ones who had also lost their dad and who were filled with their own pain.
Their pain was playing out in the ways children do when they don’t know what to do. I never want to go back to that place. Today I realized that. Just today. Going into the 4th year of dealing with my loss, I’m just realizing how deep that was for me.
I’m just now recognizing how unable I was to respond to anyone around me. I’ve learned about myself. I’ve learned about grief. I know that I still know very little as I continue to experience and adapt and evolve through this human process.
It feels unthinkable and yet is and will be a part of every one of our lives. There are 5 things I’ve learned about grief that you should know in supporting yourself through it. And for supporting those you love who are in their own grief.
In 5 blogs I will go over what I have learned in detail. For me, I can never go back to the place I was even just a year ago. Nor return to the suffering through four years. I don’t want to hurt anymore, yet I know that hurt is a part of life. That hurt is inevitable, but the suffering is not.