“I’m gonna need books,” I told a couple friends as the fog of grief descended. Hours earlier, I’d awakened to my husband’s last breaths on the pillow next to mine. Without any warning, I’d gone to bed happily married and woken up a widow and solo mom to seven children. Now, I needed to know what to expect in grief.
While everyone mourns differently, grievers share many of the same sorrows and struggles. There’s comfort in simply knowing what we experience is a normal part of the grief journey. As such, I’m sharing ten things every griever needs to hear.
1. Lament is your way through.
I remember wondering if there was a way through grief and how to even begin navigating it. Scripture models a way through with lament. Lament is taking our hardest emotions and questions to God and choosing to trust God’s comfort and faithfulness. It can look like journaling out our emotions, audible cries or soft tears, and groanings too deep for words.
“Lament is a prayer in pain that leads to trust,” says Mark Vroegop. We don’t have to fake our way through grief with God. As we process our pain, lament helps us unburden emotions too heavy for us to carry, work through them, and cling to hope through God’s character and promises.
2. You can’t rush grief.
If we could only fast forward through the excruciating pain of loss. But there is no rushing grief. Nor can we stuff it or avoid it. If we don’t deal with grief on our terms now, it will come back on its terms later.
Grief lasts longer than we expect and is harder to walk through than we imagine. Sometimes it feels like one step forward and three steps back. But God never imposes a timeline for our grief. We can let ourselves off the hook of expectations that we should be doing better or feeling better. So long as we are facing the pain and working through it, we can trust that God is moving us through the valley of sorrow.
3. Physical grief is real.
When Dan died, I felt a constant ache like someone had carved me from the inside out. I could barely eat, but the gnawing hunger didn’t even register against the physical pain of grief I carried.
Grief affects us not only emotionally and mentally, but physically as well. Loss affects our eating, sleeping, immune system, heart health, breathing, energy and more. It shows up in muscle soreness, headaches, and nausea. It wrings us out, leaving us run down and exhausted. Rest and Biblical self-care are essential as we absorb the effects of grief.
4. It’s normal for interests to wane.
I’m a long-time homeschooling mama. Before Dan’s death, I loved to pour over curriculum catalogs, teach classes and tutorials, and pull together hands-on unit studies. When Dan died, it was like a switch turned off. I couldn’t have cared less about lesson plans. I’d taught AP Government, but who cared about world politics when my world had imploded?
Apathy is a normal part of grief. Loss causes us to re-evaluate what matters and what doesn’t. It consumes our mental, emotional, and physical energy so there’s little left over for other activities. I never regained the intense zeal I once had for those interests, though I did by God’s grace continue to homeschool all of my children through graduation. And surprise! As life came back, I developed new interests and passions that have brought deep joy and purpose.
5. Laughter is healing.
The movie Steel Magnolias has a classic scene where Sally Field, playing a mom who’s just buried her grown daughter, goes from heartache to confusion to anger to laughter in a single conversation. The right kind of laughter with the right people is healing. It offers a respite from heavy emotion and a harbinger that the brutal, raw grief will ease.
Laughter with my children was a balm in the sea of dark days. Laughter with friends or even at old movies helped lighten my heart as I walked through grief. Proverbs 17:22 says “a cheerful heart is good medicine.” Ill-timed and careless humor can wound, but laughing in the safety of friends and family lifts the grieving heart.
6. Your path is your path.
Everyone grieves differently. We can’t size up how well we’re doing by comparing our grief journey to someone else’s. Some people find comfort staying busy and being around people while others need time alone and limited activities to grieve.
How we grieve is affected by the type of loss as well as our personality, experiences, family, other relationships, and faith. I grieved differently than my children, my teen boys grieved differently than my teen daughter, and my older children grieved differently than my youngest two.
While our grief journey is unique, not all responses are healthy. We should guard against unhealthy choices in grief leading to consequences that only multiply the pain and prolong the healing.
7. You don’t have what it takes. God does.
Grieving the loss of someone we love is brutal because death was never supposed to be. It will always be painful and feel unnatural, even for losses that aren’t untimely or tragic. We say death is part of life, but it’s only a part because of sin and the fall.
But God. He takes what would be utterly hopeless and gives us hope. We can grieve with hope because of the promise of heaven and eternity with God through faith in Christ. This side of heaven, God walks with us through pain and uses suffering for our good and his glory. Grief is too much for us to bear, but God gives us sustaining grace in the moment and strength to keep moving forward.
8. Grief is a process not a checklist.
If only it was as simple as checking off tasks to move through tidy stages of grief. But grief is a messy mix of conflicting emotions and tough questions that surface in suffering. It takes enormous amounts of energy to process not only the person we dearly miss but the layers of secondary losses.
Grieving involves two things: letting go of the life we wanted with the person we loved and taking hold of the life that is. We mourn for all that’s lost while trying our level best to rebuild. Loss requires us to grapple with grief emotionally, mentally, and even spiritually. As we do the arduous work of processing our loss, we will find ourselves slowly but steadily moving forward.
9. Stay flexible through unpredictability.
When I got pregnant with my first child, I bought books to learn all about the first year of parenting. But reading about babies and raising them are not the same. In the same way, we only know grief by experiencing it. Even then, the range of emotions we feel, their intensity, and their timing ambush us.
I expected the first year to be hard, but was surprised how grueling the second year was. I’d heard about anger in grief, but it was despair that gripped me. And just when I thought I’d made real progress, I would get pulled into a deep pit of sadness. In the twists and turns of bereavement, we can anchor into God who is the same yesterday, today, and forever.
10. Grief doesn’t end. But it won’t always feel like this.
Grief isn’t a destination. I wish more people knew that while grief softens and lessens as we work to process our loss, there’s no finish line for grief this side of heaven. I’ve grown accustomed to doing life without Dan here, but he is still missed at every ordinary dinner and every big milestone.
Scripture says God heals the brokenhearted. (Psalm 147:3) And though God brings most of that healing here on earth, full healing won’t come until heaven. Then, God will wipe away every tear from our eye and death will be no more. “Neither will there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain.” (Revelation 21:4)
The suffering will end. The gaping holes of loss will cease. And freed from effects of the fall, it won’t always feel like this.
