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What do we know about grief?

It’s Personal

Our grief reflects our love for the person we have lost. Yet, each person grieves in a different way. I once heard a panel discussion on grief. One lady told us that it takes one year, bare minimum, to get through what we call the grief process. She explained that those who are left without a spouse or someone close have to go through each holiday, each birthday, their anniversary and filing their income taxes.

It comes in Waves

A person may go for quite some time and not be bothered by their loss. But something can cause the grief to wash over him or her like a giant wave from the sea. As time goes on those times might be fewer and fewer; those waves will be less and less strong. Anything can cause that wave of grief to come upon us: A song, an event, a word the person used to use, a saying he or she had. This is just a small list.

The Grief Process

Experts on grief have studied this and have given us information to help us cope with our experience. There are steps in the process—Granger Westberg lists 10 in his work Good Grief. He lists these steps as statements. Others use one word titles to express the same message.

I found three points that gave me pause. 1.) Those experts do not know in what order a person will go through the steps. 2.) They also don’t know how long a person will be in each of these steps. 3.) But, they also say that the last step is “I accept that I have lost him or her.” I believe Granger Westberg adds that a person never completely gets over his or her grief. He uses a very interesting choice of words for this last step: We Struggle to Affirm Reality.1

Several years ago, I co-taught a class that studied a lesson on grief. In the story an extended family gathered for a post-Christmas vacation. The grandfather, one of his sons and that son’s young boy went up in a small airplane. The plane crashed. All three were instantly ushered into the arms of Jesus. The remainder of the story dealt with how the son’s wife and her daughter dealt with their grief. This woman had suffered three losses, two of which affected her deeply. One of the class exercises we had to do was to trace the wife/mother’s process thought the grief steps.2

I found it interesting that this woman did not go straight through the ten plateaus but revisited, sometimes more than once, certain areas of her grief.

We Have To Take Care of Ourselves

When we are in grief, it is very important that we take care of ourselves—physically, emotionally, and spiritually. Some people have servant’s hearts but when they lose someone they don’t know what to do. They wear themselves out by being ‘the strong person.’

We have to be sure we eat right and get enough sleep. We have to spend time alone with God. We have to do something for ourselves each day.

In learning to take care of ourselves, we may have to learn to do things in different ways. God guides us through the thinking we have to do in order to manage our grief.

1. Good Grief, Granger Westberg, Fortress Press (Augsburg Fortress), © 1971,1062, p 57
2. When Life Gets Tough, Stephen Miller,editor, Beacon Hill. Kansas City. © 1989 chapter 13, Possibly out of print.

"'Christ in You...'" from Dale Krebbs

Longing For God