Grief
/ɡrēf/
noun
- the anguish experienced as a result of a significant loss.
Defining Grief
Grief, by a more psychological standpoint, is the anguish experienced as a result of a significant loss. We attribute grief mostly to the death of a loved one. That's generally gonna be the source of the heaviest form of grief, but loss doesn't always mean death.
Let's break that definition down into the three defining parts. Anguish refers to severe mental pain or suffering. Pain is a pretty complicated concept on it's own, and you can refer to my series on pain to understand more about what it can tell us about our mental/emotional wounds. In short though, a good question to ask then, is when we feel all of the emotions that come with grief – which emotions are honest emotions? The word significant implies that it's had an impact on us – life looks different after we've lost the object of our grief. This is something that I'll go into more later. In short, though, we should reflect on one of the last times that we remember our lives shifting into a different chapter. Try your hardest to remember how you felt during all parts of that chapter, and compare it to how you feel about that time now, knowing what the full season looks like after being completed. Loss is obviously the biggest part of defining grief, and I think the fact that we struggle with it highlights something we often forget about the impermanence of our flesh. What I mean is that the concept of "loss" implies that we had possession of something in the first place. We understand that nothing actually belongs to us, and that everything is temporary, but that's something that's really easy to forget and/or allow our emotions to contradict. We shouldn't dwell on this too much, because I think it'd start to make us almost guilt ourselves for feeling the way we do. Still, as difficult as it is to swallow, we need to understand at the very least that we're not owed anything, and nothing really belongs to us. It doesn't invalidate the pain of loss, but it puts it into a much more natural perspective.
Grief in the Old Testament
Loss is everywhere in the Old Testament, so grief follows. There's even a common theme in the Old Testament that starts to become pretty funny. "Then, the Israelites again did evil in the eyes of the Lord, and they were punished." – I don't have a citation for that one, but just look in pretty much any book, you'll find it. They were pretty dumb, they just kept doing it lol. At the very least, there were some pretty poetic prayers that came out of all the transformation that God put the people of Israel through. Lamentations is basically pure melancholic whining for the first half of the book, which I love, because it feels so validating. "How lonely sits the city" – "I am the man who has seen affliction" – I'd encourage anyone to read through those, as long as you finish the book to see the full picture of faith in despair. Ecclesiastes is similar, if a bit more hopeful and with some different themes here and there.
Now as we mature, we realize that the patterns of our own lives mimic the constant betrayal of the Israelites. Human beings might wear different clothes, speak mostly different languages, and live completely different lifestyles – but rest assured, our hearts look exactly the same today as the first two hearts that God created at the beginning of time. But understand that loss and pain aren't exclusively punishment. Sometimes, they're plainly and simply the consequence of sin. Job lost pretty much everything but his life, and there's a belief that he had to live in that suffering for much longer than we get the impression of by just reading through all 42 chapters in a few sittings. Even falling under scrutiny from some of the worst friends to exist, that his suffering was somehow a result of something he had done to upset God. I can only blame them so much, because God did show His wrath to a greater degree during those times. Still, Job isn't pointed out as having been a man of great faith for no reason. Job's grief was initiated by Satan and allowed by God because He had faith in the man that He had built him to be, but more so because God was fully aware of His own power over sin.
Loss can have a lot of different purposes, but God isn't ignorant to any of them. He's not absent from any of them, either. Our inability to see the other end doesn't make anything endless.
Grief is Cyclical
I read into C.S. Lewis' A Grief Observed, a collection of the reflections he had during his own experience with grief, after the loss of his wife, Joy. Even someone as wise as Lewis grew impatient with the process of grief. We all have a desire for processes in our life to be linear and consistent, meaning each day we always feel a little bit better, and we only move forwards. He experiences first-hand, though, that the adjustment from any kind of transformative life experience (healing, loss, general change) is always more warped than we'd like. Obviously, he sees this to the greatest extent, because he's experiencing one of the most intense kinds of loss. But it's still true in less impactful forms of grief. This is probably the most important thing that anyone can understand about grief, whether they're experiencing it themselves or supporting someone who is. When we get pulled from comfort into discomfort, our hearts and minds have to adjust to a different environment. Emotional jet lag is real. And we only have so much control over how long that lasts. We go forwards, backwards, up, down, left, right – just because we've been moving forward for a while, doesn't mean that trend is gonna last forever. "Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape."
I love how he describes it, too. We have moments of respite, where we're managing sorrow, or whatever our affliction might be. Then come moments that send us back to acute pain when something — a memory, a phrase, a fleeting thought — triggers a fresh "wave" of grief. It doesn't always come back to us like something is being thrown at us – sometimes it's a wave that engulfs our entire being. It knocks us down and disorients us – it changes our entire mindset in an instant.
A cycle begins, where we're knocked down by the overwhelming emotions from our wounds, and periods of time where we feel like we can bear to experience a new chapter of life as those wounds turn to scars. "This cyclical nature reveals the non-linear progression of mourning; there are no clear stages to pass through, but rather an ongoing oscillation between despair and moments of attempted normalcy". But we can't really force ourselves out of that cycle – experiencing it is a part of adjusting to a new chapter of life that's unfamiliar to us. Sometimes, we don't even want to escape that cycle. Sounds strange, but letting go of something that was a part of us at one point isn't easy or simple, even if it's already gone. We have a desire to honor it at the very least, or acknowledge what it meant to us. There is an ongoing tension between wanting to honor the memory of what/who we've lost and needing to find a way to continue living. This cycle stems from the unique appreciation that we have for that one source of happiness or comfort. We enter it as we're discovering what that uncharted version of the world – a world without it – looks like. Almost as if we're switching between the new version that we haven't broken in yet, and the last version that we had molded into – as the connection to it slowly breaks, like a tattered rope under intense stress. We hang from that rope, fearing what might happen when it breaks. It's not until it does, that we realize that the drop wasn't quite the freefall we expected.
"Down Days"
That being said, our "down days" are not simply tragic. These waves that knock us down, as much as they seem this way, are not created with the sole purpose of punishing us. Days where we seem to go backwards aren't just inevitable – they're the only way by which we can really measure growth. This isn't too hard to comprehend, but much (MUCH) harder to experience, so bear with me. The deeper our emotions go, the more we can learn about them. Now unfortunately, that means we also have to feel them more, but wisdom is both a blessing and a burden. Sin is a curse that will follow us for as long as we live. We are by nature, weak creatures. So we can conclude that sin is created to afflict us, and we're made to be afflicted by it. Life is not the escape of that sin, it's the pursuit of working through it. Working "through" it both meaning to endure it as we fulfill God's will, as well as using it to increase our understanding of God's mercy, strength, and love.
Recovery, growth, healing – whatever you might call it, this is what it looks like. Not very fulfilling, but that's kind of the point. We can't take this perspective that we're "too grown at this point" to have moments of weakness and periods of painful struggle. Anyone that's lost something they grew attached to, regardless of the circumstances, experiences recurring waves of grief. "These moments serve as stark reminders of our loss but also as milestones of our continuing recovery. Each bout of sorrow, while painful, brings a deeper understanding of our emotions and a stronger resilience." In this way, progress in grief isn't necessarily indicative from how you feel, but how much you've endured.
The Power of Love
I once heard that grief is just love, with nowhere to go. Understanding what going "backwards" actually represent gives an entirely new understanding of how to embrace grief. Instinctively, we want to resist our natural reaction to loss, because it makes us feel weak and ashamed. We'd like to think that once we've grown enough, we're immune to the feeling of hopelessness, or that we can handle being brought back down to earth on our own. But grief, when embraced rather than resisted, can deepen one's capacity for love and understanding.
Let me try to illustrate how our "natural" way of thinking misses the mark on this. I have a desire to let the Lord use struggle to grow me – make me stronger, more wise – so that in the future, I won't have to battle that same thing anymore. That's already wrong. We seek "strength" in the pursuit of minimizing struggle, whereas real strength comes from experiencing the struggle as it comes to us, and staying faithful to God at the same time. Strength is not found in power – it's found in giving up power. Strength is not found in armor – it's found in closeness to the One that keeps us from needing it. "Power made perfect in weakness. (2 Cor. 12:9)" Instead of trying to use these experiences only to build up my resistance to them, I'm now using to increase my understanding of God. I'll in some way become more resistant to certain struggles anyway, because I'll have seen the other side of similar struggles before. But the pain and loss that I've felt, deepens my understanding of what true love looks like. Inimitable – perfect, and impossible. I can't see the ends of that kind of love, since it goes far past the limits of human understanding, so the lengths that I can see it go to are only as great as the pain I've experienced when I can't feel it with me any longer. How powerful must love be, if I'm capable of experiencing this much pain from it escaping my sight? "The capacity to love deeply also comes with the possibility of enduring great pain. Yet, this duality does not diminish the worthiness of love; rather, it accentuates its significance and transformative power."
Redefining Grief
After I started reading into Lewis' experience navigating the loss of his wife, I tried to empathize (on a much, much smaller scale) using my own experiences with loss, to create a different, more practical definition of grief. So instead of trying to summarize my points, I'll keep things simple by giving you what I had gathered about grief based on experiences alone.
Grief can be characterized in part as the process of discovering a new, unique happiness that’s different from the one we lost. The old happiness is dead and gone, but a new happiness that we’ve never known is being conceived. That conception is painful, cyclical, and incredibly non-linear, yet it’s the only time we get in our lives to discover our true identity.
"Surely I spoke of things I did not understand, things too wonderful for me to know. (Job 42:3, NIV)"
I’ve lived for a long time with the fear that I might never have met me, and consequently that no one else has ever known me either. But that might just be a common theme during out own individual walks – getting to know the person that only God knows everything about. I look forward to getting to know him, and introducing him to the people that I get the chance to love in the future.