Growing Around Our Grief — Grateful, yet Grieving
Last week, I returned to a space where I frequently visited immediately after my husband died.
It was a Pilates studio that I hadn’t been to in a few years. What I experienced when I entered the room was strange, yet familiar. This was a hallowed space; a place where I felt the grief in my body as I moved and attempted to wrap my head around the sudden loss of my husband. There was also a sense of healing as I entered the room. I wasn’t the same woman who came in five years ago. I was different.
Today’s photo that is attached to this post is an appropriate visual to describe how we change as we grieve. We grow as we grieve.
The first row of jars and balls is what our culture accepts and expects; that our grief will slowly diminish over time and eventually go away. Grief does not end. Our love for our loved one does not cease. Our grief changes who we are.
Dr. Mary-Frances O’Connor, professor and author of “The Grieving Brain”, says, “……for people who might believe they won’t feel grief again, that someday this will be ‘over’. It doesn’t matter how long it has been since the death, when you become aware of the loss of something so important, you will feel that momentary wave of grief. But that doesn’t mean it won’t also change over time, become more familiar, more manageable, or even the source of great compassion for others – even though it will never go away.”
The second row is more accurate; our grief is always with us. It’s the place where the grief is housed that changes. We expand and make room for our grief. The empty space where we kept our loved one now is filling up with memories, different ways of doing things, new routines, and adjusting to a life without your loved one.
We loved so we grieve. We grieve and we change. We find a grace-filled hope in a different life that we imagined. A blessing from Kate Bowler echos our hearts, “Blessed are we, who, instead demand a blessing. Because we have wrestled with God and are here. Wounded. Broken. Changed.”
