Framing Our Pain

Getting a handle on grief is like trying to hold on to a stick of butter on a hot summer day. Try as you might, you'll never be able to figure out how to keep it from getting all over the place and making a mess of anything around you. Go ahead, wash your hands. It feels like an endless task that only when you think you're good, you go to grab something that slips from your hand and you realize the residue is still there. That's what happens when you're grieving and you're good, move forward, and drop the grip of goodness because grief's ugly face is still staring right back at you.

Grieving is not a new and developing emotion. We'll probably never know where or when it first happened. Or maybe we do, my Bible scholars. (much love) Everyone, every single person hasn't had a grieving experience just once but probably handfuls of times over and over. What's different is that not only is each grief different because of the connection to the persons we lose or the situation surrounding the death, but grief likes to compound itself. Piling one event on top of the other, death after death, weighing on us while we're still trying to deal with the first one from the age of 8, we're all the sudden finding ourselves dealing with the one from when we were 30 and every single one in between.

That's just one person, one life, and one story. Then you bring in the rest, the news and the grotesque world that we live in. Children playing in their yards, students going to the movies, teachers trying to teach a new generation, and people just doing their jobs trying to protect people who think they have all the solutions; dying. Dying every single day, to no fault of their own, other than that they were just there. We have our stories, our individual lives we're trying to cope with, and then for the empathetic ones, we feel the pain and the grief for those that have to lose, and lose on a highly publicized level.

How is it that grief can take its long and unforgiving fingers and wrap it around our lives without ever letting go. To rebuild your soul, to learn to feel and love again, to trust that life won't end before you fully get to engulf it with your love is laborious, to say the least.

There are apparently five stages to grief; denial and isolation, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. What no one ever tells you, whether it's your first loss or your most significant loss, is that sometimes, if not all the time, those five stages can occur all at the same time. The same time, and for as long as they please. Even if you let them go, put them down, move on; it's not at all your choice because it's grief's choice as to when it will let you go and when it will let you move on.

It's a vortex of five stages that I champion those who quickly find the life raft out of it. For those that are haunted by it, and thrown around in it every single day, you're not alone. It's just people don't want to stand there and say they're stuck somewhere in between either one, several, or all five stages in a stare down with their grieving process and it's a shell that encompasses them.