Experiencing loss vs grieving

Working through grief is a process that may take years. Don’t worry that it’s taking too long. Many times we think we’ve moved past mourning a loved one only to find later, years later, that we haven’t when we burst into tears while picking out oranges at Kroger.

Here are two perspectives that helped me look at grief more openly, even 10 years after losing my son to suicide:

1. All There Is

Anderson Cooper learned he hadn’t grieved his losses after he had produced an entire season of a podcast about grief called “All There Is.” His father died when Anderson was 10, his brother died of suicide when Anderson was 21, and his mother died in 2019. Recently he discovered that experiencing loss and actually grieving are two different things. Hundreds of grieving people left him voice messages after they’d listened to his podcast. He took the time to listen to every single message. He says:

I don’t know exactly how to explain it, but hearing all those calls – all that pain and bravery and love – awakened something in me that I had buried long ago. I decided to start going through the boxes of my parents’ and brother’s things once again, and the first one I opened was full of my dad’s papers. He was a writer. On top of the pile was an essay he wrote more than 40 years ago. I’d never seen it before. It was titled “The Importance of Grieving,” and in it, he wrote about what happens to children when they aren’t able to properly grieve. He quoted a psychologist who said, “when a person is unable to complete a mourning task in childhood, he either has to surrender his emotions in order that they do not suddenly overwhelm him, or else he may be haunted constantly throughout his life, with a sadness for which he can never find an appropriate explanation.”

When I read that, I realized, for the first time: That’s me.
from CNN: Anderson Cooper is Learning to Grieve

Now Anderson is bravely doing a second season of his podcast because he understands that in burying his grief, he buried his ability to feel joy, and “I don’t want to do that any longer. I can’t. I want to feel all there is.”

In particular, the brilliance of his first podcast in this second season– Facing Our Grief— where Anderson talks with psychotherapist and author Francis Weller, blew me away. It’s one I’ll be returning to time and again.

Weller says:

What grief work does is it has a way of deepening our capacity to hold sorrow, to hold suffering. James Hillman, one of my primary teachers, said that the issues are rarely about resolution. We’re not here to resolve our issues. The issue is about spaciousness. How much can I hold? How much can I allow in to touch me? Most of us, because of our traumas and our grief, that aperture has become so small that we barely register the sorrows of the world. We barely let them in.

Very few of us had our grief, our losses held adequately by anybody. So that unhealed material doesn’t just disappear, it doesn’t just go away. It burrows in and becomes someplace that we will have to return to at some point.

There are three principles to addressing grief, according to Weller. One is to slow down. Don’t “water ski” over your feelings. The second thing to bring warmth to this place that sometimes for all of our lifetime, but also for generations, has been carried coldly. Use compassion, kindness, affection, curiosity, self-compassion. And the third principle is to bring it into some type of communal attunement where we can share what’s there. Reach out to others. Talk about your loved one and how you’re feeling. Allow others to share.

2. Love, Loss and Learning to Lose Expectations

Lynne Cobb, a fellow writer and Michigander, lost her 12 year old granddaughter to to Myocarditis. Lynne has many resources on her website that deal with grief and loss. Her most recent blog post addresses Holiday Expectations and how they can trip us up:

“Is it possible to have peace this time of year if we remove our expectations? What are we expecting? How can we change our expectations to anticipations? Will these expectations bring the peace and happiness we seek? Or will we feel hollow and empty because this season doesn’t “look and feel” like it once did, or how we perceive it should?

What if, instead, we anticipate that things look and feel different, and that’s okay. That mindset feels like it could take some of the pressure – and disappointment – out of the holidays. My anticipation will be that, in spite of the losses and how the landscape has changed, I will find moments of peace and gratitude.”

~ Lynne Cobb https://lynnecobb.com/expectations/

Little rituals

Francis Weller taught me how rituals help with grief. When my son Derek lived in an apartment near us, I gave him a small lit tree for Christmas. When he took his own life in 2011, I found it on his patio. I brought it home, and every year I decorate it with all the special ornaments I’d collected for him since he was a newborn. They include ornaments from both his grandmothers, hockey themed ornaments, a sailor in a Cracker Jack box (since he served in the Navy), a mouse with slice of pepperoni pizza, and a giant M&M (both favorites), and one for the year he was old enough to vote. He made a few of the ornaments for me in grade school.

I now understand that decorating this tree is actually a grief ritual. Sometimes I cry when I touch each ornament and think about Derek as a sweet-smelling baby, as a boy learning about the world, as a rebellious teen. I stay open to that deep place of sorrow and allow it. I know, after twelve years, it isn’t going away.

The candle near the top is from my mother after he died. She said a candle in the window will call the dead home. Isn’t that the most lovely thought? Come home, my son, I’m here.

Other kinds of grief

Grief can be more than the loss of a loved one or friend. Some changes, such as a move, the end of a marriage or relationship, the death of a beloved pet, or the loss of a job can also cause us to experience grief. Grief can be sudden, gradual, or delayed. Even the absence of feeling grief when you experience devastating loss is a form of grief.

There is no normal form of grief, just as there isn’t a correct way to process grief. Some types of grief may be more complex than others, more long-term, or may require professional help to work through.

Please know, if you are missing someone this year, you are not alone. Scale back your expectations and reach out to others. May the magic of Christmas live inside of you.

If you or someone you know is in crisis, call or text the 988 Suicide & Crisis Lifeline  at 988. The Lifeline provides 24-hour, confidential support to anyone in suicidal crisis or emotional distress. Call 911 in life-threatening situations. 

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Thank you for visiting.

Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a writer, poet, and artist:
Multi-finalist award winning novel: In the Context of Love
Picture book: Gordy and the Ghost Crab
Poetry chapbook about the loss of her son: Sleepwalker

Connect with Linda: LinkTree