Depends on what you call grief, how you define it, and what you define as recovery from grief.
Let me suggest something better for you — yes, amid your grieving season if that’s your lot right now. Grief will take you on a journey nothing else can. We resent it and we lose touch with what can be gained if we allow our perspective to be challenged.
First, it’s okay to grieve, and it’s right to grieve. There’s nothing wrong with doing something we can’t help but do — that is lament the loss of someone or something that was incredibly important or that meant the world to us.
How LONG will I grieve for is one of the hardest questions — there really is no credible answer to it.
So why did I call this article “How long will I grieve for?” I want us first to have permission to grieve so we don’t feel we’re wrong for grieving too long. I want us secondly to know that placing a time limit on how long we’re suffering isn’t the best focus. A better focus for now is to imagine the conditions for growth that we’re in, not in spite of the grief but because of it — if only we don’t hate it entirely (for we will certainly hate some of it, much of the time!).
It’s only after we’ve had the question answered in our own lives — i.e., we can say, “the pain in my grief has shifted to the degree it’s no longer holding my life to ransom” — that we know how long it lasted. Typically 3 years if we want a rule-of-thumb. Sometimes more, sometimes less.
What we learn in suffering that we cannot learn any way else is wisdom — e.g., “I cannot control this,” “I love therefore I grieve when I lose what I love,” “I have no energy for selfishness or greed.” The list runs on. We suffer and we’re not the worst version of ourselves — indeed, even as we suffer our hearts are opened in compassion to the suffering of others, and we’re kinder, softer or heart, more receptive persons.
If what we do in our suffering grief is to look to the heavens and say, “God, how could you allow this pain in my life?” at least we can say we’re praying to God.
We might be angry with God but at least we’re looking for meaning for how to work our way through the horrendous lament of it.
Even if we turn our back on God one day, yet look back in faith the next, we are growing in our faith through simply surviving.
It’s one of the hardest things to do, to keep our faith, when we’re suffering. And yet, in suffering, it’s only faith that will keep us from being destroyed, and in suffering, it’s only faith that will carry us all the way through to a place where we’re stronger than ever — especially as we look back from the other side having made it all the way through hell.
“How long will I grieve for?” If we can on certain days look with hope on the promise of a future, and on other days be thankful we got through, and on other days again, be grateful for what we still have — especially the spiritual things — we have a better focus for the present than a focus on a nebulous future that only sows doubt (and yet, doubt strangely nourishes faith).
There’s nothing truer, grief changes us. We do not go back because we CANNOT go back. When we accept this dilemma — a truth that cannot be changed and can only be let go of one moment at a time — then we live out what can be termed post-grief growth. This is a wiser, more balanced, more compassionate, more empathetic, bigger, more mature life.
