One Story of Grief
“Are you crying? What’s happening?”
“I just feel really sad.”
“What do you need?”
“I don’t need anything….I just need to feel sad right now.”
This is a conversation my husband and I had while driving through the picturesque Czech countryside after visiting a small town where I used to spend every summer as a kid and through my early adulthood. It’s also the place where a large part of my family, including my father, rest in a quiet little graveyard. Tears are rolling down my cheeks as I write this blog. They aren’t painful tears. They are warm and feel almost nourishing, healing. I welcome them. This is a story about my grief, or at least a smidgen of it that can fit into a blog. I felt compelled to share it, even though it might be controversially personal. I am a human and just like everyone else I have and will continue to experience loss and the grief that comes with it.
Grief isn’t always clear cut and obvious, in fact, it’s almost always the opposite of those things. Although it might seem like my introduction hinted at me grieving my father who passed away some 15 years ago, the reality is that my grief is much more complicated than that and so is the experience of most people when grieving. Literature offers some ideas about the different stages of grief and the ways in which we may experience them. These may be helpful in some ways to some people. Personally, I see grief as something that comes in waves. If we allow ourselves to be swept by them and we let ourselves relax into their power, we will eventually land on the beach. We will feel pain, because losing someone or something we care about hurts. Acknowledging and accepting our grief is a huge part of processing it.
So what is grief?
Grief is our response to the experience of a loss. Losses can be quite tangible like the death of a loved one, redundancy or loss of physical abilities due to an injury or illness. Other losses are quite abstract – such as the loss of a sense of safety most of us experienced during the global pandemic or the loss of trust after a partner’s infidelity. Most loss comes as a mix of the two and it’s often got something called secondary losses attached to it. It can, therefore, be quite hard to identify what it is exactly that we’re grieving. This can be confusing, disorienting and most certainly painful. Grief usually is all of these things and more.
Sometimes grief can strike us in surprising and unexpected ways. For me this was the case when I was spending time in my home country a couple of months ago. I have lived in Australia for close to 15 years. I love my life here and almost never miss the Czech Republic, where I was born and raised. While on our trip, I started noticing strong urges to touch the grass, the soil, the water in the forest stream, smell all the smells and listen to the songs the birds sang. I kept pointing out to my husband how beautiful the landscape was. As if asking if he could actually believe it. I felt a strong connection to my ancestors, my land and how I’m a part of it and it is a part of me. I got in touch with my motherland that I had been disconnected from for a long time. This was very bittersweet because while it felt almost magical, I knew that I would be leaving in a week or so to continue on our trip and wouldn't be back again for some time. Equally hard was leaving family members and long-term friends behind. I felt it was all almost too painful to allow myself to feel it. So I didn’t. I wasn’t ready. This was a loss that was “new” to me. I needed time to understand it better.
My father died in a small town in the south of Czech Republic in a house where his own father passed away. He died of a heart attack in his sleep, peacefully - I hope, but very unexpectedly at quite a young age. His death was a complicated loss because of many details surrounding his death, family situation and our relationship. I still grieve the closeness I was hoping to have with him. He was a deep, complex man and we were becoming closer just before his sudden death. I grieve that he didn’t get to meet my son, who sometimes reminds me of his grandfather when he’s deep in thought. I grieve he cannot be here to see how wonderful my life turned out. Waves of grief washed over me as I sat in the car and we drove away from the place where he took his last breath. The sadness felt so right. I was grateful for being able to stay in touch with it and let myself cry. Grief is washing over me right now, as I sit at my desk on the other side of the world. I don’t expect these waves to stop coming, although they continue to change in their strength, shape and impact. They are reminders of my connection with my dad and of being human. This loss is a recognised one. One that I have been able to fully acknowledge. I won’t be moving on or getting over it. I will keep discovering its new layers as my life continues.
The first week back from our big European adventure things started to fall into place and more and more waves of grief came. Some of them were quite out of the blue, like while reading a bedtime story to my son. Suddenly, in this happy, cosy place, I felt overwhelming sadness that my son doesn’t get to do this with his Czech “Babicka” (grandma) and all the other things he is (and I am) missing out on because we’re far away. While our kids' bedtime isn’t the best time and place for allowing ourselves to be fully in touch with our grief, we cannot ignore or push it away forever. I had to find space to feel the depth and complexity of my own grief. I needed to learn more about it. There are a lot of things I am sad about, they are important, they’re telling me what I value and how much I love. Not allowing myself to feel this would be dismissing the importance of the messages my grief carries. I am grateful that I’ve got in touch with my love for my home country and the people in it. I am grateful to be learning about all the things I would have loved my dad to experience with me. These feelings, although often painful, are keeping me connected to my ancestry, homeland, family and friends. Our relationship with the people, places and things we lose doesn’t end with the loss. It continues to evolve and navigating it is our grieving process.
Being a therapist doesn’t come with the privilege of not experiencing discomfort or strong emotions. It does come with the advantage of having done our own therapy work and being able to stay with our emotions. Clients often share with me that they are not sure their feelings or emotions are “right” or whether they “can trust them”. All our emotions are true, valid and important. Grief can be confusing. We can have strange thoughts that accompany overwhelming feelings. Allowing ourselves to experience them without judgement helps us feel them and let them pass freely. Ignoring, suppressing or fighting them doesn’t work out well, definitely not in the long run.
In the last month, I found myself repeatedly acknowledging my grief, my pain and my longing without trying to solve it. I welcomed all of my confusing feelings exactly as they showed up. I allowed myself to feel the pain and trusted that I would be OK even when it felt like it might not. I was. I am. I am still grieving and probably will continue to for some time. And that’s OK too.
This is only one story of grief.
Your story will be different. It may be one of a fresh loss that has taken away too much and your world has fallen apart. You might be falling apart. Life circumstances may be stopping you from allowing yourself to fall apart. You might feel angry, enraged by the unfairness of your loss. You might be too overwhelmed and use different coping strategies that help you cut yourself off all of it. All of that is valid. Our attitude towards our experiences is where we can always choose to be gentle, kind and compassionate with ourselves. It’s OK to feel whatever it is that you’re feeling. Grief isn’t linear, it’s not predictable and we’re not supposed to move on. It has its own individual timeline and we can’t bully ourselves out of it or pretend it’s not there. Accepting our grief as it comes supports us in processing it and finding new ways to stay connected to those we lost and the things we love, but can no longer be close to and even those we hoped for but never had.
Writing this blog has been a great way to connect with my feelings and really helped me process and release some of them. If you are experiencing grief, engaging in writing, painting, singing, dancing or any other kind of creative or expressive activity can be a great source of support. Reach out in the comments, phone call or an email to connect and share your story.
