I Just Had to Share This

During my late online reading last night, I came across this article.  It touches on the long term-"ness" of grief.  I thought most of us could relate.  In case you don't feel like reading the whole article, here are some passages that found me nodding my head in strong agreement.

"Grief is a sneaky bastard. You expect it to ruin your sleep and make you fight back tears on your morning commute and to wander into rooms and forget what you were doing – for a while. You understand that it will spur people to be really nice to you and ask how you’re doing and bring over lasagnas – for a few weeks. And then, you assume, every day it will get a little better and it will hurt a little less. That’s what you think, that is, until the day, long after the lasagnas have stopped rolling in – when something triggers it, and the wound feels so sharp and deep that you feel like no time at all has passed. Until you don’t even know how to talk about what you’re going through any more, because the seasons have changed and the rest of the world has moved on. Until you’re embarrassed that you’re not “over it” yet, and you can’t explain how you’ll still, for just a moment, sometimes forget that you can’t call that person any more, or sit together at the dinner table. Or you’ll laugh at something and then you’ll suddenly be crying because you remember you can’t share it with the one you lost. That’s how grief rips into you. How it surprises you, over and over. It’s not linear. It doesn’t follow a neat path. It drags you all over the landscape, for longer than you ever imagined possible."

And...


" my mother-in-law recently helped start a grief group for women who, like her, are in their second year of widowhood. Their facilitator has to wing it – she said that she’s never done anything that addresses long-term grief. Why not? Why is the notion that grief doesn’t have a simple timeline so hard for us to admit? Is it because we have so many cultural taboos on difficult, complicated emotions? Is it because we’re so quick to put people down for not being strong when they’re really just sad? Or, more hopefully, is it because while we all intellectually understand that loss is forever, we also have to have the faith that pain is not?"

And...

"What happens instead is that the pain changes. It subsides and it morphs. It becomes a scar that you can get around with. And if you’re lucky and you have a lot of love in your life, it can even inspire you, as it has with the Winehouses (who created a foundation in their daughter’s name), to greater heights of compassion and service. But it marks you and it changes you. You never go back to being your old self. You never go back, period, because the person you loved is dead, and that absence is there every day, forever. That’s how grief evolves. It’s when enough time has passed that you start to see that everything else in life changes, except the fact that this person is gone. That that’s your one great, awful constant in a world of flux."