Ungrieved Grief — Grateful, yet Grieving
On my way to meet a friend for a walk, I drove by two storage unit facilities next to each other. I thought it was strange, but I soon discovered there are over 52,000 storage unit facilities in the U.S. Translated, we store a lot of stuff.
It caused me to wonder, how does that relate to our grief?
Recently, while listening to a podcast, I heard the words “ungrieved grief.” In pondering the phrase, there’s an element of what we haven’t been able to process yet or what future grief is waiting to be processed: the “leftovers” and the “not yet” grief.
I wonder, do we have an emotional storage unit in our brains where we store our grief?
Are there boxes containing some aspects of our grief we have packed away and not gone through? Are there parts of our grief where we postponed the feelings so we can just get through the day? Just like a storage unit, we place things we don’t have room for but plan on looking at them and using them in the future.
Our boxes can remain where we put them for a while until we decide we are ready to “go there.” Storing our grief temporarily is necessary. It takes courage to look at where our grief is being stored. We enter a sacred space in our “ungrieved grief” storage unit.
Dr. Alan Wolfelt, author and grief expert, says, “Enduring the pain of grief is perhaps the most difficult challenge of human life. Being separated from someone we love hurts. It hurts so much. One essential rule of thumb to remember is that you don’t have to grieve and mourn all the time. You cannot and should not. Instead, you must “dose” yourself with the pain. Feel and express your grief for a bit, then take a break. Back and forth, forth and back.”
Maybe our emotional storage unit is the way we “dose” ourselves, as Dr. Wolfelt says. Might we be so kind as to consider that we can visit our “ungrieved grief” in its storage unit with gentleness and courage? Taking time to do so allows us to “go there” as we “go through” our grief.
