How to handle grief and loss

What is grief?

Grieving, to me, is loving.

Grieving is honoring.

Missing is honoring.

Missing the space this person used to take up on the planet, and now that space is aching, it’s empty.

The problem with grief is that we make it about us. We always make things about ourselves, when it’s really not about us at all and neither does it serve us to believe it is. It’s never about us.

I’ve had this one ringing line repeating in my head lately, saying:

“There is no wrong way for reality to play out. There is no wrong way for reality to play out.”

David Kessler is an author who’s written several book on the subject of grief, and I really recommend you to google him if you’re going through something heavy. In his book “life lessons”, he says: “But like it or not, change happens and, like most things in life, doesn't really happen to us - it just happens.”

The second we really truly start to live from this belief, so much will shift. Things don’t happen to us, they just happen. It’s not about us. There is no wrong way for reality to play out.

We are just here to observe the way reality plays out and what we control is how we choose to respond and react.

This is the world. Terrible things happen, and beautiful things happen. You can’t change that, and you can’t stop that. All you can do is decide how you want to move through the world and respond to things.

This doesn’t mean that you won’t go out and try to make a change, help where you can and create your own opportunities, it just means that when we’re talking about things like death and loss and grief, acceptance really is key.

You most probably have heard of the 6 stages of grief. If not, it’s a formula used by therapists when they work with clients who go through grief. This formula was developed by a woman called Elisabeth Kübler-Ross, and she has documented this whole process in a book called On Grief and Grieving, that I also recommend you to pick up if you are dealing with grief right now.

The five stages are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance.

No matter what you are dealing with, even if it’s something a bit lighter and smaller, you can’t go from the event to moving on. You have to go through some sort if processing so that you can grow from it, learn from it, understand a bit more about what it means to be a human, and then you can move on. It’s the same with the 6 stages of grief. You can’t go from stage 1 to stage 6, then you are missing the whole point of grief. Grief, like any other heartbreak, can be the most crucial self development opportunity in your entire life. Don’t waste it. Face it and become a better person through it.

Healing and moving forward, doesn’t mean that the loss didn’t happen. It doesn’t mean that you will forget about them, let them go or deny. It simply means that you will not let the loss control you. It means you will carry the loss with you but you are in control.

Here is an important line I also found in a book on grieving:

“What would best honor the years they didn’t get?”

This is so powerful. Honour them by the way you now will live out your life. Vast, curious, brave, honouring the people who did not get to experience this day.

I will end with another excerpt from David Kessler’s book “Finding Meaning”:

“After all my years working with the dying and the grieving, I have found that in this lifetime, the ultimate meaning we find is in everyone we have loved. Your loved one’s story is over. For unknown reasons, their time on earth has drawn to a close, but yours continues. I can only invite you to be curious about the rest of the story of your life.”