Grief status… It’s complicated

Grief would be okay if that’s all it was in all its painful purity.

But grief is so often not only multilayered, it is most often buried within another mountain of loss that we just cannot reconcile. It’s as if whichever way we look at it thwarts our understanding, confuses our hope, fatigues our vision, trounces our energy.

Anyone who has suffered protracted grief—let’s say longer than 12 months, which is pretty typical of any grief journey—will lose hard won friends, suffer ill-health and unexplained illness, experience significant negative changes in family dynamics, possibly lose their job or need to change their job, and on top of that be required to keep secretive some part of their lives they’d prefer to be open about.

Not just that, though; it’s the depression, the anxiety, the panic attacks, the fear, the confusion, and the seismic shifts in mood that descend without warning.

And not just that. Life is completely coloured by fear, even when there’s an absence of fear, for it crouches as an ever-present threat, lurking always on the horizon, threatening like a rabid dog because of the suddenness of its arrival.

I had a breakdown once that left me catatonic; wind the clock back one hour and I was fine. One experience like this teaches us that the floor of grief is an abyss. It’s the scariest thought imaginable.

When we know that that’s the potential outcome of a sock-full of fear, we live subsumed by the idea it could occur anytime—that’s hyper vigilance together with depression for the abject lack of security experienced together with a plummeting of purpose. Life without meaning is one step removed from, well… you know what. This is the unravelling of identity; total deconstruction of the essence of our being.

Not just that, either. If the above weren’t already hard enough.

As some of our most trusted relationships start to go south, our support systems are being completely overhauled, and we feel at the whim of a merciless nemesis. Betrayal is a byword, for what grief is there without some sense of betrayal, whether that’s someone expecting us to ‘get over it’ or a betrayal that led to the grief in the first place.

And then there’s the element of baggage; previous griefs we’ve not been able to reconcile; those unremitted invoices of sorrow and trauma. Many of these in many of us are unconscious and we may not readily recognise they’re even there.

So, the visible grief is tangibly the tip of the iceberg.

Most onlookers literally have no idea the level, detail, chaos and complexity of a person’s lot who has a grief status… it’s complicated. Even those close to them. And the grieving person would give anything to be understood, but they would never wish what they’re experiencing on anyone, because they still live in the shock that this level of pain should not be possible. This pain, compounded by the virulence of its sustained presence, completely undoes us.

The existential process of grief makes of the possible, impossibility. Everything that was once taken for granted as easy is now just about laughably and insanely unmanageable.

It’s to these cases that “What’s wrong with you?” needs to be changed to “What happened to you?” And to genuinely ask that question of someone backwashed in their grief requires an even mix of patience and perseverance that reassures the grieving person that such gentleness is safety.

A grieving person isn’t to be healed, as if healing could be procured in a worldly dimension of time, or care, or a prayer. No, grief is a confounding mystery.

The last thing a person with complicated grief needs is a further lack of safety. Even though they want IT fixed, they do not want to BE fixed.

Photo by Karim MANJRA on Unsplash