Do You Ever Fully Recover From Grief?
It was a beautiful fall day when we learned one of our close friends, a groomsman in our wedding, passed away unexpectedly. The following year, my mother-in-law suddenly passed away. Eight months later, after an unsuspecting illness, my mother passed away too. I could hardly recognize the ashes of our lives over those 18 months. Each loss was increasingly hard. Could I ever recover from this?
They say, “Grief is love with no place to go.” They say, "Grief and healing are like two parallel rails that never meet. You will always grieve, but the journey of healing can make it more bearable." But in the throes of early grief, who wants to hear stories about healing or that your tears are the result of love's dead-end? I certainly didn’t.
Elizabeth Kubler-Ross, author of the classic, “On Death and Dying” wrote, "The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not 'get over' the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal, and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same, nor would you want to."
She’s right. Grief is evidence of a great love story. Even with its deep pain, great loss, and endless tears–grief is a normal, healthy process. I determined early on that when the waves of grief came, I wouldn’t fight them. I would feel what I felt in that moment as if my tears were giving my love a place to go.
Rose-Lynn Fisher conducted a fascinating study on the topography of tears you can read here. She studied tears under a microscope, during a time of profound grief, and the spectrum was interesting. Amongst her findings, she noted that tears from grief look entirely different from tear to tear. As if they all had their own “signature” or purpose.
Each time I surrender to my waves of grief, it’s as if I could see life a little clearer. Like each tear does the work of removing the scales from my eyes. Those blinders that keep me from seeing how to truly live. As I sit with my grief, perhaps each unique, scale-filled tear heals me. The blur removed. Clarity. Focus. Vision.
Healing has been not moving on or forgetting the people I love. For me, healing is the decision to sit with my pain and allow it to teach me its lessons. It’s staring deep into my darkest days until I glimpse some beauty I can take with me. Whether it’s our friend’s carefree love of life or my mother-in-law’s generosity or my mother’s joy amid life’s most challenging days. I can choose to funnel this deep love I have for these beautiful souls, allowing it to inform how I live my life, love my husband and children, and engage those around me.
Truth be told, grief and loss don’t just take. They give gifts too. My grief and loss have been the process of becoming real. I’m convinced the world needs to see less perfectly filtered squares of buttoned-up seasons of life and more frayed edges because that’s real life. Grief has given birth to great empathy in me and eyes to see others and love them well. So perhaps the question isn’t do you ever recover from grief but will you choose to become more real through grief?