Your Family’s Journey Through…the loss of a loved one.

Grief. Such a heavy 5 letter word. When you lose someone that is close to you the journey through the grieving process can be painful and laboring. You feel the weight of the loss. You miss the presence of that person. You miss hearing their voice and the memories that you have made with them. Life can exist in a sort of blur with no clarity in sight. C.S. Lewis stated in his book, A Grief Observed, in reference to losing his wife, “Her absence is like the sky, spread over everything.” Grief is all-encompassing. It overtakes every feeling and emotion. It saturates the deepest parts of your being. Days seem impossible and the darkness seems endless.

But one day, the darkness will start to seem a little more illuminated. The fogginess starts to clear slightly. You get a glimmer of hope and clarity. Not that the pain is not still inevitably present, but a new “normal” begins to develop.  In those moments you are strengthened. You think, “Okay, maybe I can do this.” And the truth is that you can. You put one foot in front of the other and you start another day.

One of my favorite representations of the grieving process is depicted below:

In the image, grief is represented by the blue ball and the red box is identified as the “pain button”.  In the early days of loss the ball is much larger and as it is moving around it triggers the “pain button” often and you experience the waves of emotion and ups and downs much more frequently and intensely. But, as time goes on that ball of grief shrinks, though it does not go away altogether. As the grief shrinks, the “pain button” is triggered less often. You have more time to recover from the moments that are overwhelming.  You have time to gather yourself and pull yourself up. Though the greatness of the grief can still be just as shocking, it does not occur nearly as often, and you can catch your breath.

That gives me hope and encouragement. That though the weight and heaviness of grief is hindering, there is relief and healing. You will not come across a single person who has not been affected by losing the life of a loved one. We all walk around with invisible scars that cut to our core. What is beautiful about those scars is that they make us into the people we are day in and day out.