Don’t Get Over It
Don’t get over it
I used to think that grief was something you just get over. You go through the 5 stages and poof! The sadness and pain of the loss are over. You just had to ride out this one big, horrible storm. It wasn’t until my own experiences with grief over the last several years, that I realized this will be with me forever. Grief will always be a part of you once you lose someone. And I also learned that it is a journey to grieve someone and you can learn to carry the grief with you in life. Grief can help you repurpose that person into your life you never thought possible and offer moments to heal and grow.
Losing a loved one results in permanent fundamental changes to our lives. Losing a spouse, for example, means having to learn how to take on all the tasks they handled in our lives, every simple small event changes meaning from getting up in the morning, to eating a meal, coming home, having an experience you’d normally want to share, celebrating a success or going through hardship. Nothing is the same and nothing will ever be the same. And how could it be – our grief is a measure of the love we had. While grief does get easier to carry over time, our love will never disappear, so neither should our grief.
What we do face in life, however, is a lot of pressure to “get over it” – we are all familiar with platitudes like “they are in a better place”, “everything happens for a reason”, “time heals all wounds”, “at least they are no longer suffering”. While well-meaning, these sayings communicate an expectation that we should no longer feel or express pain or sadness at the loss. Many people who are grieving begin to feel that they “should be over it already” and begin to not only experience the ongoing pain of grief, but also self-doubt about whether or not something is wrong with them that they continue to grieve.
The reason that we tend to offer these platitudes is not because you should be over the grief, but is often more because it’s hard for people to continue to hear about loss and to not be able to do anything to help. When we are a listener we tend to reach for platitudes because we feel helpless and experience fear about facing bereavement ourselves. The platitudes have the effect of both making us as a listener feel we are helping, and making us feel that grief has an end point, making it easier to tolerate. It tends to stop any further conversation and protects us as a listener from having to keep hearing about death and feeling fearful and unable to “do” anything about it. In other words, it’s not that you should feel better, it’s that the listener is trying to figure out how not to be distressed themselves.
Talking about loss helps. At the beginning it can feel like you’re in shipwreck in a storm and it’s everything you can do to cling onto the wreckage and survive the waves that are crashing over you. Over time, and by talking about the loss, the waves become smaller and less frequent, and you have space to begin to construct a new ship and set off again. Life will be different, but the extent to which our lives change after a loss is a measure of the love we had and how much the person we lost was a part of our journey. Storms will occasionally still come, but we find a way to weather them and adjust.
As painful as it is, we rebuild by facing our grief and having people we can speak with about our experience. If you’re having trouble finding a person in your life who can be that listener – who will always be willing to hear about your memories of the person you have lost, how this has changed your life, all of the different feelings this brings, and how they continue to be present in your life moving forward, then speaking with a bereavement or grief counselor can help. A bereavement or grief counselor can be a person who can hear about all of the parts of your grief until it gets to a place where you’re able to rebuild and find a new way forward.
