After someone we love has died, grief overwhelms us. It’s almost like a living organism that wraps itself around us. This organism grips our stomachs and makes it nearly impossible to eat. It invades our hearts, sometimes causing them to beat irregularly. We ache from the intensity of the organism’s grip, but often times we can’t even determine where exactly it hurts – perhaps because in some ways it hurts everywhere. Grief carries a lot of weight, so when it attaches itself to us, we look different, we walk differently, we breathe differently.
So the question is, Do we ever break free of the grip grief has on us? If so, how and when?
The answer that comes to my mind immediately is, yes, we do break free, if we are willing to help make it happen. Some people cling to grief, long after grief has loosened its grip on them. Sometimes people will wear grief like a comfortable blanket because it allows them certain freedoms upon which they become dependent.
Grief offers us the freedom to cry whenever we need to, which is good and important. We might need to cry a lot, and if the intensity of the pain lingers, we might find ourselves needing to cry a lot for a long time. But when our grief (after it has subsided) becomes a license to cry whenever we want, over whatever we want, for however long we want, it is a misuse of that freedom.
Grief offers us the freedom to be angry for a time, but when we consider it a right that we cling to for years, we make everyone around us miserable. We who are grieving are often given leeway when it comes to responsibility, but we ought not take it to a point of thinking it is now our perogative to be irresponsible and irritable. When we take the freedom that grief offers us and misuse those freedoms, we become prisoners of our own self-destructive behavior and attitudes. We are unable to break free to enjoy life.
So, in some sense, we choose when grief no longer controls our lives. Grief will always be there, especially when the loss is someone who was very significant to us, but we don’t have to let it always have the say in the quality of our life. When it comes to how we break free from grief’s grip, we also can have a choice. Sometimes, however, it just happens.
The first moment I felt a slight release came only days after Jacob died. A friend of ours was in China on a business trip at the time of Jacob’s accident. His wife had called him in China to give him the news, and he decided to call us at home. He spoke with my husband, Michael. After discussing the awful details of Jacob’s death and accident, our friend began sharing funny thoughts and memories of Jacob with my husband. I didn’t hear what he was saying, but I heard my husband laughing. That laughter came as such a shock, but I was thrilled to hear it. Not just anyone could make my husband or me laugh at that moment, but this particular friend certainly could. He had always made us laugh in the past, and he was able to do it again, even in our darkest hour. That laughter gave me unbelievable hope that grief would not have its stranglehold on me forever.
Grief’s grip can be loosened to a point of not really even noticing it is there some days, but grief, especially when it is profound, never really ends. It softens and gets easier. There are longer periods of time between one deep ache that sends us to our knees and the next, but the subtle ache remains forever. I think the pain that accompanies grief is supposed to last; it serves to remind us of the frailty of this life and keeps us longing for what lies ahead. For me, Heaven lies ahead. I will be with Jesus and Jacob and so many others whom I love and miss.
That’s when grief really ends.
Journey Of Grief ~ Journey Of Grace 