I will never forget August 9, 2007. I just had my 40th birthday, I was newly married, and believe it or not, suffering either a form of midlife crisis or grief or depression — I really didn’t know what at the time. The June and July period were horrendous. My new wife really didn’t know who she had married. There was so much conflict within me and within our marriage at the time. We were under attack.
I don’t think either of us envisaged that the early going would be so hard.
But having had my 40th birthday, it was almost as if I could feel something shift subtly within my spirit. I was on the cusp of a breakthrough.
Being in a role within my work at the time where I was required to promote the employee assistance program (psychological counselling support for employees and families), I decided to partake of it (again). I went to see a counsellor.
It was the weirdest experience. It was nothing like you’d expect a counselling session to be. I only when once. The counsellor was abrupt. It was a matter-of-fact kind of conversation. “Don’t think you’re depressed. You’re just grieving. Much of depression is really grief,” he said.
It got me thinking years before I became a counsellor myself. I didn’t necessarily agree with him. But I did recognise that what I really needed at that point was a jolt — not that I’d advise doing this in every or any other kind of situation. But I was forced to reflect whether I was depressed or experiencing grief.
WHAT EVEN IS GRIEF?
We can surely know that there is something we don’t understand — until we understand it. And then when we do understand, we thank God for the times we didn’t!
Grief involves a depth of suffering that the human spirit cannot conceive, nor touch, nor describe or explain. It torches one’s hope and then tantalises it, before dashing hope against the rocks once more, and this cycle occurs over and over and over again, ad nauseum. Those who haven’t been there have no idea, and they (and we) should be thankful.
Yet, how much would we give in our grief for someone to come alongside us like the Holy Spirit? Yes, it’s at these times that we learn the true value of God in spite of the worship that God deserves.
Grief is depression, every single bit of it, and depression is also the pit of grief. It may help to name it, but in the longer run of things, what does it matter other than to put a label on something we must find meaning for? But this, too, is important.
Grief involves the gamut of suffering and part of it involves real, classic depression. But what part of depression doesn’t also involve the facets of grief?
Surely the depths that grief takes us to explains how incomprehensible depression is; who would have thought that depression would take us into a land where we have literally no control left over our lives, other than to breathe, to sob, and be rendered immobile?
Depression is nothing that we can just “snap out of” and neither is grief. Both are a journey, and both demand rigorous respect.
Grief, they say, takes months, and possibly six or twelve to adjust to — and it is an adjustment. My experience is that’s just the worst of the grief dealt with — or at least we’re not shocked with how abysmal it is anymore.
What remains in the longer term leaves whole days strewn to the wind, and though they may be infrequent, once we’ve grieved, we never truly return to what was.
Grief is sticky, or maybe we could say that the depression in grief, once it’s in us, continues to remind us of its indelible presence in our lives. This simply reminds us of that which changed us irrevocably — some form of loss or recognition of lack.
Very truly grief and depression remind us most of all that we’re human, and that earthshattering sadness is not only possible in the human experience, it’s inevitable for those who would be real.
Is it grief or depression we are suffering? It’s a helpful question to muse over. Such questions remind us that both cause the other, and that these two may at times be indistinguishable.
If you’re deep in either, I am so sad for you. Hold on for the deeper call of God within it. Like me, you could find God could not be found without it!
I pray that God will compensate you for what you’ve been through or for what you’re going through. Hold on in faith.
Photo by Martin Adams on Unsplash
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