The number 1 lesson in the school called Grief

If there’s one thing grief teaches us, it’s that grief is everywhere.

Somehow, until that fact dawned on us, however, we were not so blissfully unaware. Well, I know that’s how it was for me.

Until I suffered for the very first time, as a fresh-faced and still quite naïve 36-year-old, I really had no concept for what much of the world is like in this regard. Suffering is everywhere.

Everyone will experience grief. Everyone is floored by life at some point.

And then we have matriculation to enrol in one of the schools of hard knocks.

But the irony of life is there are those who insist on bypassing the school of grief in order to go to one of the other schools of hard knocks—one where there is no reprieve and no healing.

Everyone will be tested by the assessments of life taught in the school of grief.

Not everyone passes. Some turn to escape and fall into addiction, some choose extreme escape and leave this earth, some just avoid feeling any other way they can, while others get brutally bitter toward others, God or life itself, and they drag everyone around them who will go there with them into their journey of torment.

But if we sit in gentle, patient humility, accept the crushing, for that is what it is, we actually begin to answer the questions correctly on that bewildering assessment called grief. We recognise that to have no answer is the right answer. Grief is the only test where being bamboozled is the right response. 

Grief is everywhere, and when we first walk through grief’s doors we suddenly come face-to-face with this reality. It’s as if a whole new world—one we very reluctantly take tentative steps into—opens up before us.

Suddenly, we begin to notice suffering is everywhere. The entire planet is littered with it. It intrigues us if only we accept we need every resource available to us to get through it alive.

How do people cope? How do they survive? We begin to become intensely interested, because we ourselves need those coping mechanisms that we know must exist—for hope won’t let us rest without searching for them.

In an environment where survival is the key objective, grief teaches an urgency, and piques our attention like nothing else has and like nothing else will. It’s a primer for growth, simply because if we don’t grow, we don’t survive.

So, there you have it. Grief teaches us that suffering is everywhere. Little wonder then, that the wounded healers of the age to come will be those who are grieving now, and who attain their healing; for, those who are the wounded healers now have been those who reconciled their grief and cannot help evangelise the gift of healing.

Why are we so passionate about it? It’s because it works. We’re impelled to purpose.

There is a school named grief. Not everyone who is invited enters. Those who do, go there to deal with their pain, and they learn to feel, learning what they cannot learn elsewhere, and they graduate with honours in empathy and compassion, and are blessed in being a blessing wherever there is pain.

Grief teaches the lessons of pain in order that we might learn to sit and not fix, to attend and dwell with, not to advise, to continue to learn, not be know-it-alls.

Photo by Ana-Maria Berbec on Unsplash