- We lose people, not our relationships with them.
- Whether it’s to death, relocation, changes in life circumstances – we all lose people, and with any loss comes a version of grief.
- It can bring profound comfort to hold on to the awareness that even though we lose future interactions with a person once they are no longer in our lives, the relationship can and does go on to live inside of us.
- One of the most beautiful things about our ability to hold on to a relationship internally, even after its external presence has ended, is that we can continue to learn, grow, and be comforted by it.
- With our internally driven relationship we can come to reflect on past experiences with the person in a new way, and at times see a person and their past choices differently.
- For example, if you lost a parent, you may come to a have a different sense of what could have motivated them if / when you become a parent yourself.
- Once someone is no longer in our lives, the relationship shifts from being externally driven to being internally driven. We have to learn to carry the person and relationship differently when someone no longer has an external presence in our lives.
- Thinking of a relationship and a person as “internally” existing in you is often much more comforting than thinking of them as being “gone”.
- Grief is loss and sadness, but it is also learning; learning how to live without someone’s external presence, learning to remember that they will no longer be there around the corner, and adjusting to that new reality.
Grief is incredibly wrenching, painful, and (somewhat) unpredictable for us all. One of the most uniformly difficult parts of tolerating grief is how chaotic it can feel; one minute you’re “fine”, the next minute you’ve had a reminder of your loss that feels like a gut punch. Those “reminders” are our indication that we are still in the process of learning to live without someone’s external presence in our lives.
We can find additional comfort when grieving by focusing on growing an internal relationship with the person we’ve lost. For example, ask yourself how the person would have responded to a situation you’re in, what advice they would have given you, or what they would have thought about a situation in your life or community. Give yourself permission to be honest; we are most comforted when we can bring back our genuine sense of who the person was to us.
For many of us, the loss of important people is complicated by their intermittent presence in our lives. When we’re not always with someone (like if they lived in a different house), it can be natural to “forget” they are no longer with us, only to “remember” when we’ve been reminded. Sensory reminders (like a smell or a sound that reminds you of them) can hit especially hard. This “forgetting” doesn’t mean the person wasn’t important, it means that our intermittent exposure to them prior to our loss of them makes the “adjusting” and learning more complex and difficult; even when they’re gone it doesn’t necessarily feel like it, because they weren’t always around to begin with.
Grief, like all learning, takes time. Maria Popova wrote a wonderful summary of the book “The Grieving Brain” by Mary Frances O’Connor, PhD, in which both writers talk about grief as a two part process that involves loss and learning (link in comments). There is, inevitably, a powerlessness that comes with grief. That powerlessness can be painful to tolerate because it reminds us of the limits of our control, our mortality (etc). These authors provide an explanation of grief can that can be hugely comforting because it diminishes our sense of chaos and powerlessness by helping us understand the complexity of the grieving process.
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- The more respect we can have for the process of learning, and the more acceptance we can bring to our grief, the less it will sting us. See posts on learning and acceptance for more help with this.