Good Grief?!

When I was in grade school, I fell in love with a cartoon strip. It featured a round-headed kid who seemed to be the brunt of everybody’s joke, his dog that danced and slept on top of his doghouse, a thumb-sucking, blanket-dragging philosopher friend, a toy piano virtuoso, and a self-proclaimed fussbudget and purveyor of questionable psychiatric advice. Of course, I’m talking about the comic strip Peanuts® by Charles Schultz. One of the recurring comments voiced in exasperation by Charlie Brown and occasionally other characters was “Good Grief.”

At some point in time, many years later, I came to look at that expression outside of its comical context. Is there such a thing as a “good grief?” Isn’t grief, almost by definition, someting to be avoided, something we experience as being bad? However, as we all know, we cannot escape grief. Grief is an experience that is part and parcel of human existence. Grief is that set of emotional and psychological responses that we have to any experience of loss. It is a universal human occurrence. 

There are many forms of loss that can result in grief: death of friends and loved ones, divorce, job loss, demotion of job, rejection of book or grant proposals, a sudden inability to do something that you have planned on doing, betrayal or abandonment, etc. Many griefs make up our lives. How we deal with our grief in part determines the emotional readiness and openness we have to engage our families and friends, as well as our jobs or other commitments in life. How we deal with our various griefs may make all the difference in how open we are in listening to our hearts, and listening to others from our hearts. Therefore, an important part of tending to our hearts is to know how to grieve well, so that our hearts will be well. 

One of the pioneers of understanding the process of grieving is Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross who described five basic stages to the grief process: 

• Denial, 
• Anger, 
• Bargaining, 
• Depression and 
• Acceptance. 

These are summarized by Drs. Kübler-Ross and David Kessler on their website, Grief.com. I invite you to read their description of these stages there. They offer the following comments about these five steps:

They are tools to help us frame and identify what we may be feeling. But they are not stops on some linear timeline in grief. Not everyone goes through all of them or in a prescribed order. Our hope is that with these stages comes the knowledge of grief ’s terrain, making us better equipped to cope with life and loss.People often think of the stages as lasting weeks or months. They forget that the stages are responses to feelings that can last for minutes or hours as we flip in and out of one and then another. We do not enter and leave each individual stage in a linear fashion. We may feel one, then another and back again to the first one.We can never replace what has been lost, but we can make new connections, new meaningful relationships, new inter-dependencies. Instead of denying our feelings, we listen to our needs; we move, we change, we grow, we evolve. We may start to reach out to others and become involved in their lives. We invest in our friendships and in our relationship with ourselves. We begin to live again, but we cannot do so until we have given grief its time. ("Five Stages of Grief")

The most helpful way to move through grief is to allow ourselves to grieve in the manner that most befits our individual emotional and psychological constitutions. It is inappropriate and unhelpful if not damaging to dictate to anyone how they should grieve. No two people will grieve the same way. 

Grieving is a natural process of the body as it responds to the extreme emotional stress of loss of any kind. When I say “body” I mean just that. Our brains are an integral part of our body, and they have evolved over the millennia to form deep emotionally-laden attachments to persons, landscapes and situations in life. By virtue of how our brains process sensory inputs, everything we experience has an emotional tag applied to it in our memories. When an experience comes along that represents a rupture in the fabric of our experiences will likewise rupture our emotional fabric. Grief is the process our bodies and brains go through to assess the damage of that rupture and to slowly reweave the emotional fabric of our consciousness.

Because our brains and bodies are one unit, we experience grief in our bodies. We may not be hungry for a while, or we may be ravenous. We may burst out impulsively in sobs, and feel totally empty, walking in a daze. Depression is a common response, and does not represent an aberration. We need to listen closely to all these expressions of grief and acknowledge how they are affecting us. As Drs. Kübler-Ross and Kessler remind us,  we can never replace our losses, but we can make new connections with people, new friendships, new vocations, even explore new directions in our life. 

Grief is never easy. I know this personally. I have been laid off from several jobs, received many rejections for articles I have submitted to scholarly journals, been rejected in job applications, I have been divorced twice and have had several significant relationships dissolve. I have been unemployed and underemployed, and even was homeless for several months. I have had all four grandparents die, as well as an aunt and uncle and most recently my father. Many of my hopes and plans in life have never been realized, and disappointments have seemed to dog my door. All of these carve out a place of emptiness within me that is the terrain of grief. How I explore and navigate that terrain directly determines how supportive I can be to others who are going through grief. It determines how open I am to exploring the remaining landscape of my inner life. And it is precisely this inner life that I offer to God each day for healing, for guidance and for filling. 

So it is that tending to our grief is a vital part of tending the heart.

(Image sources: http://resources3.news.com.au/images/2010/04/28/1225859/150047-charlie-brown-039-s-moving-house.jpg;  http://thecicadacollective.files.wordpress.com/2009/01/grieving-parents-side-view.jpg;   http://www.unexplained-mysteries.com/images/news/brain7.jpg;   http://www.shmoop.com/media/images/large/grieving-soldiers.jpg;   http://www.desktopwallpaperhd.com/wallpapers/1/760.jpg)