How Long Should We Grieve

If you have lost people in death or distance, you are allowed to be in grief- to grieve. This is how we are created, to give grieving its utmost time. It may take years and years of grieving before we have the capacity to generate a validation that love is not long lost. Loved ones may be.

Grieving is never a linear process, we go back and forth, with more and less acceptance over time.

Every person we love (and for some our pets) leaves a real, structural imprint in our brains and it is in these grieving moments we are simultaneously re-mapping those deep imprints and renewing our minds, internally processing our emotions which helps us heal.

At a more basic level, bereaved people have to relearn every small habit that incorporates the ‘we’, beyond just ‘you’ and ‘me’. So, every time you cook a meal and don’t have to automatically consider your child’s food preferences or every time you reach for the phone to call your mom with the news of the day – each of these is the learning to not take into account the other person on this earthly plane. 

The Patterns of the World

The problem is that we are stuck with the patterns of the world and the way it sees grief and sorrow. We might think we won’t feel grief after crying over it, “that someday this will be ‘over’.”

It doesn’t matter how long it has been since the loss or death, and abruptly you become mindful of the loss, you will feel that brief surge of grief. Yet we become more familiar, more arranged as time passes, even becoming compassionate for others, when the sorrow is never gone inside of us.

How do we channel that inward sorrow?

We all are marooned by grief and sorrow and by loss and we know a bunch of flowers may not be enough to overcome it. Perhaps when we know that every change is a way for our brain to rewire itself, we may see the hope of living in the present attached to the strings of our past memories thus we do not shut ourselves down in life. To help our brain learn that every sorrow, as painful as it may get, has the capacity to develop a heart that can overflow with affection.

Tips on how to grieve –

Be patient – Do not blame yourself if you are unable to overcome the loss. As in many things in life we have to develop patience in this matter too. Grief and how our brain and neurons along with our emotions are relearning and readjusting themselves in the world, will take time. And time can be different for different people. Be patient.

Do not blame yourself – Sometimes grieving is also deeply mixed with lost opportunities. Those ‘I wish moments.’

‘What if I had this one opportunity to hug her tightly before she closed her eyes forever?’

“What if I packed her woollens before she left for university?”

In our heads, this shift is too much to bear. So we may find enough reasons to fix this grief with ‘what ifs.’

That rational burden of blaming ourselves is such a deep hindrance in seeing the whole gamut of love and forgiveness. The things we could not do does not define our love for them. Even if we could do what we wanted to do, we would still grieve for other reasons.

Letting Your Emotions Out

Writing, journaling, recording your voice and sending it to someone who knows your grief, having someone to listen to you. Most of the time our usual response is to keep mum about how we feel about the loss and how we are grieving. In the eyes of the world grieving for too long may simply be labelled as a sign of weakness. Which in reality is not a weakness. It is a natural process. So we take our time, get back to our lives and start to find healthy ways to let out our feelings.

Because there are many ways to grieve so are many ways to show your love too.

Hence, maybe it is a good reason to send a text, an email, or drive across that trough to tell our tribe how lovable they are. Maybe to also coax them to love in whatever way they can. Maybe to move boldly along with sorrow and mend the world with our awe and wonder. It is in the heartache we are able to discover the newness.

I know all of this is stupendously harder to practice than writing or even reading it. We all know we need to forgive, but we all know in our experience that it is not always the easiest choice to make.

“Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won’t either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let yourself sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could.” 
-Louise Erdrich