Those who read my blog, or know me well, know that in 2021 I lost my papaw, my dad and my father in law. My papaw within six month of my dad and my father in law, and my dad and father in law within days. We had two funerals in one week. I have blogged about it before, but I felt it a worthy topic again. Grief is so very tricky and sometimes hard to understand. Everyone deals with it differently, and that’s okay. There’s no one right way that everyone should deal with grief. Today on my Sessions with Shauna I am dealing with this very topic and wanted to share something with you all that a dear friend of mine shared with me recently. By his permission, I use his words below. There’s wisdom in these words, and I believe maybe some solace for someone.
Grief
Throughout my life, as with all of us, I have experienced varying degrees of grief when loved ones passed away, but never had I experienced the full impact of grief until my father and wife passed away within 10 weeks of each other last year. This past year has been a forced process, so to speak, in discovery. Discovery in the process of grief. Discovery in what it means to love. Discovery of me.
In our human condition, to truly live is to love, in all of its various forms. Love comes in many shapes and sizes. We are told we should love our neighbor, and hopefully we do, but that love is different than a love we might have for a good friend. It is certainly different than our love for a grandparent, sibling and parent. Even more, it is different than our love for our children and significant other.
Grief is a product of that love. Grieving is an expression of our love. It follows then that our grief when a loved one dies has its own varying forms just as love does. And just as no two people love the same, no two people grieve the same. Likewise, we can also be assured our grief for a friend or extended family member, for example, is likely to be different than our grief for our child or parent. I discovered this when my father and wife passed away while trying to process why my grief for each felt different. It wasn’t that I loved either more or less than the other. It was simply because my love for each was a different form of love.
Understandably, when my father and wife passed away I was devastated. Looking back I know I was going through each day in a fog just trying to get to the next day. I was operating on autopilot. I recall foolishly designating a period for my grieving during which I would allow myself to go through the ‘grieving stages’, after which I hoped to complete my grieving. I even scheduled a week long getaway to seclude myself to get the process started. The getaway was very beneficial for my emotional state but was absurdly naive in its intended purpose. I have learned over this past year I have no more control of my grieving process than I do over controlling the tides of the oceans.
Speaking of the stages of grieving, we are told there are five stages of grief: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. In my personal journey this past year I have not experienced all five stages for either my father or wife. And the stages I have experienced for each were not all identical and those that were present for both were in different forms. For example, with regards to the grief for my wife I cannot say I experienced anger but I absolutely did in the grieving for my father. I experienced forms of denial for both but in different ways. With my father my denial was in the form of refusing to think about his death. The denial with my wife came in many forms and in some ways continues to this day, but another form of denial has been my refusal to consider the possibility that my grieving was impacting my life more than I realized. I did not truly understand it’s impact until attending Christmas midnight Mass when all of my grief was unleashed in an emotional realization of the grief I had been denying for so long.
One other thing I have learned over the past year is that there is no time period for the grieving process. In fact, I now believe we will always grieve for the person who has passed. If love is forever, this only makes sense when we understand grief is a product of love. But that is not to say this never ending grief will always be the debilitating deep emotional sadness that is part of our grief when our loved one first passes. I have found in my own experience the first stage of grief has a very large component of self-sorrow focused on the reality of our loved one not being with us again. Slowly, however, my grief transformed to the point of where it is today with a focus being a means of our loved ones being kept alive in our memories. So where grief in its early stages was full of pain it now brings the warmth of love to me full of wonderful memories. Written by Paul D. Baugh
It is my hope today that I can help others, and shed some light on the pain that grief causes. I hope you do the work to find some peace and love throughout the process, regardless of the type of hole the death of your loved one left. I do believe that peace can co-exist with your grief.
With love for you all,
Shauna
Shauna's Sisters 