Thoughts on Grief: When will it be enough?

January 2019

Over the years working as a counsellor, grief is an area of therapy that makes up a large component of my counselling practice. Grief is a word that is used interchangeably with bereavement, but grief is not exclusively about the physical death of a person. Grief and loss are to be found in so many different everyday experiences, like a person who is alive but is electively absent from your life, a breakup of a relationship, a divorce, loss of a dream, a pet, infertility, losing your job or the end of your career, loving someone who is self-destructive, an illness. The loss of a sense of security from hijacking, kidnapping, and burglary.  Grieving is the human response to traumatic life events that happen to us all the time. It is part of living our lives.

The question that so many of my clients bring to therapy is: When will it be enough?  When will I be done grieving? I can’t do this anymore? How much longer? When will the pain stop? My answer is, “I don’t know.”  I don't know because it is the clients unique, individual journey.  Grief doesn't fit neatly in a box. Some forms of grief take years to work through, other types take a few months, some take a single moment of deep acknowledgement.

The grief you're experiencing is yours, and you can carry it with you for as long as you like. You will let it go only when you feel ready, and if you don’t feel ready, then that’s okay.  Grief is painful, overwhelming,  emotionally and physically exhausting, messy, chaotic, and can feel like your heart is breaking.  It can however, offer a glimmer of something - perhaps insight into a deeper feeling of a truth about your life, of what is important to y0u and what you value. How much you wanted something, or how deeply you care about someone, and then being aware of how far you have come in this grieving, from where you once were. As Mark Nepo puts it, "The pain was necessary to know the truth, but we don't have to keep the pain alive to keep the truth alive."

All a therapist can do is walk alongside the person, in their pain, for however long it takes, and be there to support them when they stumble, and help them up again to continue this path.  And then, maybe ...You will know when you get “there,” because you will be available to try and experience life again. It might be that you are available to feel some happy moments, and that is okay.  When you have more happy moments than sad ones, and that is okay too.

What I know for sure, and what i can tell you, is that It will just be different to how it was before.  So if you are experiencing a life event that you are grieving, know that you will most likely return to a place that can maybe be called a “new normal” in time. The important word to emphasize is “new”.  New might mean, different, an adjustment. It might mean being able to choose to be mindful of the past, but open and available to life and moments of happiness in the here and now, today, one day at a time.  This quote by LR Knost is beautiful in how she describes life and what might be possible for the griever.

“Life is amazing. And then it's awful. And then it's amazing again. And in between the amazing and awful it's ordinary and mundane and routine. Breathe in the amazing, hold on through the awful, and relax and exhale during the ordinary. That's just living heartbreaking, soul-healing, amazing, awful, ordinary life. And it's breathtakingly beautiful.”   -   L.R. Knost

To come back to the original question of “when will it be enough.” It might be that the griever just learns to roll with the “awful and amazing living heartbreak” of ordinary life. And each time you encounter and engage with that grief you realize this is how it is going to be - part of ordinary life. And in ordinary life there is room for other things.

I leave you with the thoughtful words of the great Elizabeth Kubler-Ross. It is perhaps fitting that she answers the question of: When will it be enough?

“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.”