Good Grief: Session 1

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Good Grief

Purpose: To talk to one another about grief.  Whether you are going through grief or have a loved one going through grief, it is important to know that grief is real and it is ever present.  Modern society may see grief as something to fix, but in fact it is something you carry and that stays with you. 

In this course, we will look at the realities of grief and how we can walk in and through it together in a healthy way... Good grief.  This does not mean it will be all puppy dogs and flowers; I can guarantee you this is not the case.  It is a course that will bring up strong emotions, tears, anger, regret, sorrow, doubt, and much more.  Healthy does not mean happy.  Good grief means you are going through the pain in a way that does not paralyze you and keep you in a place of continual desperation and despair.

Introduction
I’m not an expert on grief. I’m just someone learning to live in a life of grief I never planned for.

A textbook definition of grief: The natural psychological and physiological response to loss, particularly the death of a significant person, involving emotional, cognitive, behavioral, social, and physical reactions as a person adapts to the reality of the loss.

A simple definition: What happens to us when someone or something we love is no longer there.

C.S. Lewis writes, “Grief felt so like fear… The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning. I keep on swallowing. At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed.”[i]

Until I lost Carrie, I was unaware of the large grieving community that exists. I was too self-focused to fully comprehend that so many others were hurting and grieving. Although I showed empathy whenever I heard of a tragedy, I was also guilty of passively saying the very things I don't like to hear today… “God’s got a plan in all this.”  “This tragedy may have surprised you, but it didn’t surprise God.” “She/He is in a better place now,” and the list goes on. In my self-focused world, I don’t think I was trying to be insensitive, but I was. Words… they can really bite.

Even the way I viewed death was shallow. I knew death was real, but death was certainly not something I needed to focus on. The death of my wife was certainly a foreign concept. Because we both knew, I was supposed to be the one who died first, and that reality was way down the road. Besides, we had plans; we were going to have grandbabies, see our children get married or pursue lifelong careers, we were going to travel together, and we lived our lives as regular normal people do: we argued, we cried together, we loved, we worshiped together, we criticized, we lovingly rebuked, we experienced job loss together, and we supported each other. Ultimately, we had each other, and even though we knew one day death would come, that was in the future… waaay in the future.

Then death came. In one quick moment, death snatched away the one I had spent over 30 years of my life with. I had known her longer than I had not known her. And one moment she was with me, talking, asking what we wanted for dinner, and the next moment she was gone… unresponsive.

I used to think death wasn’t so scary because the Bible tells us not to fear it, but death is scary. I have a new understanding and respect for death because it has knocked on my door and it has taken the one I loved most in this life. Death used to feel far away; now, death doesn’t feel so distant, and I am aware that life is fragile and death can be a real punch to the gut, and it brings the hardest things I have ever had to bear… grief.  Oh. Good ole grief. 

We are Getting it Wrong
The Reality of Grief
Mark Nepo writes in the forward to the book  IT’S OK THAT YOU’RE NOT OK, “In living our (lives), we are here to love and lose. No one knows why. It is just so. If we commit to loving, we will inevitably know loss and grief. If we try to avoid loss and grief, we will never truly love.”[ii]

We can learn from one another. Those who suffer carry a wisdom the rest of us need. We live in a society afraid to feel or to express feelings; this is why it is important to experience love and loss together and authentically.

The way we deal with grief in our culture is broken. The reality is that we all experience grief in some capacity, and the way the world around us views it is not helpful or healthy. When tragedy hits you, your life is forever changed, and how you respond shapes who you are today. Until recently, I can honestly say I did not know how to grieve or how to support and love someone who was grieving. I look back at those loved ones who lost a spouse, and I shudder when I think about how I “cared” for them. When Carrie died, I realized how insensitive I was and how bad a friend and support I was during the darkest days of their lives. I was so convicted by my insensitivity that I apologized to both for not being a good friend or support. Both graciously accepted my apology. From that point, I vowed to grieve well and to support those who are grieving.

Grief is not unique.  How we grieve is. We have all experienced grief and loss.  We’ve also felt misunderstood in our grief and loss. We’ve also been on the other side of grief as we stood by, helpless in the face of someone else’s pain. We say things to try to make people feel better, knowing full well that words can never make anything right. There is no victor in grief. It is common for grieving individuals to feel misunderstood, and for those who love us to feel helpless in the face of grief. Those of us grieving know that we need help and support, but we really don’t know how or what to ask for.

We all want to feel loved and supported in our grief, and we want to help those we love. Unfortunately, we either don’t know how or what to do, or we were just plain taught wrong.  Many of you were probably told at one point, in some capacity or another, to not trust your feelings, suppress them, and get on with life.  This is essentially what most of us are taught… maybe not literally, but certainly implied. Many people see grief as something to be fixed, overcome, or defeated.  We are not taught to see grief as something we should support. Unfortunately, this keeps us from caring for ourselves in our grief and hinders us from supporting those we love.

Our culture has not taught us how to navigate grief with the skills needed to be truly helpful. If we want to work through grief effectively, we must talk about it. We must understand that it is a natural process, not something to suppress, rush, or deny. So many people who are grieving don’t talk about their pain and grief. Sometimes it’s easier to put on a happy face and pretend all is well rather than be honest about our true emotions.
In the weeks to come, my hope is that we can look at the reality of loss, pain, and grief and learn together how to work and walk through grief. To see grief as something that is shouldered throughout life and not something to be fixed. 

Questions

1. What messages have you heard—from family, church, friends, or society—about how a person is “supposed” to grieve?
2. Why do you think we tend to treat grief as a problem that needs to be fixed rather than a reality that needs to be carried?
3. Why do you think we are so uncomfortable with grief, sadness, and loss? Why do we often feel the need to “fix” someone who is grieving?
4. What is something someone has said or done during a time of grief that was genuinely helpful? What is something that was meant to help but actually hurt?
5. If grief is not something we “get over,” what might it mean to grieve well—to learn to carry grief without allowing it to completely paralyze us?

[i] C. S. Lewis, A Grief Observed (New York: HarperOne, 2001), 3.

[ii] Megan Devine, It’s OK That You’re Not OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand (Boulder, CO: Sounds True, 2017), xi.

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