Verified by 
When I read that almost seventy percent of people who lose their spouses will die from Broken Heart Syndrome within a year, I was not surprised. I was thrilled, until I looked at Puppy, snoozing softly with her head on my lap, and knew I could not leave her behind.
Before we continue, I want to let you know where I’m going:
The true experts on grief are the people who live it, but nobody believes that for reasons that baffle me. It's kind of like men writing about childbirth and advising women on how to breastfeed.
Here is what I know to be true:
- So much of what I was told about grief is wrong.
- Why we never have to say goodbye.
- How social and cultural expectations can rob us of the spiritual and hopeful side of grief.
- Grief is the beginning, not the end.
I confess that one of the things I love best in articles about grief is the outrageous trainwreck of things people say to the bereaved. I give you my top two. "Why is everybody talking to you and ignoring me?" This, at the funeral of my husband.
"Just stopping by to see how you are and tell you how sorry I am that you are going to be so lonely for the rest of your life. Was Valentine's Day hard?"
Neither of these comments had any impact: My grief belongs only to me and I don't let the drawbridge down.
Mostly I remember the kindness of people who just said . . . sorry. Sorry works fine—there aren't any magic words, because you can't fix grief. And I treasure the quick, terse advice from those who had already been through the wars, always delivered in whispers. Yes, retail therapy actually works.
Grief is the complex concert of knowing that comes from the brain, the gut, and the heart, all three held together in the connection of neural pathways. Every year we have "National Grief Awareness Day." Well-meaning, no doubt, but it's as if we need to take care of our awareness in twenty-four hours and move on.
Most advice and thinking on grief is based on making everyone around you feel better. People are afraid of grief, and rightly so. They want to think of it as a passing thing, like food poisoning. Take tango classes, get out some, you'll be fine in two weeks.
But grief is love. And it is only human to have intense and prolonged feelings that are Tsunamis on some days and gentle ripples on others. And because grief is love, grief is forever.
My own therapist told me right off that it takes a minimum of a full five years to process big traumas in your life, a divorce, the death of a child, a spouse. That you do not get over it, you learn to live with it, on your terms and your timeline.
We developed a practical skill set for getting through really hard days. We talked about the effect of grief on filters (meaning you say what is on your mind, which I thoroughly enjoy) and grief brain (make a checklist to follow before you leave the house -- phone? keys? purse?). How to navigate dangerous territory -- grief vultures hungry for the juicy details of your life that they might want to try on for size, people who want to boss you and your grief around, the compassion fatigue that makes people want you to get over it already.
He helped me celebrate the gifts of grief...the thrill of heightened, intense creativity. The blistering clarity that gives you the freedom to celebrate who and what you love in your life, and to ditch everything else. New and extraordinary insight on little mundane issues like the meaning of life and why am I still here. He would open each session with "How many people have you banished from your life this week? What, just three?"
And when I asked if I had to join a grief support group, because I didn't want to tell anyone my sad story and I did not want to hear theirs, he laughed and said I'd give it three minutes tops before they'd kick you out.
What he gave me was permission to find my way. You be you, he would tell me. I love it when he says that.
Because grief is my pathway to the extraordinary, always around me, I just did not see. It is remembering who I am, finding the parts of me I had somehow lost, it takes me to the real, it takes me to the knowing. What do I want as I walk through my days? Who do I love, what do I want to grab hold of? Or for now, do I just need to be still?
Grief takes time and it never goes away, but there is the possibility on the far side of pain that brings me a little hum of happiness, and an ongoing connection to the ones I love. It is woven into the tapestry of my life.
And if I tell you that one sultry summer afternoon, curled up in my porch swing feeling grief sick . . . cheeks shiny with tears and flushed with the heat, I told my husband out loud that I missed him and Where was he? and I am sorry for not appreciating it more when he gave me flowers, and I wished he could give me flowers right now. And if I tell you that a freshly blooming geranium immediately dropped from the flower basket hanging over the swing, falling softly into my lap, and that I laughed because I knew this was the love and sly humor of my husband who was magically close somehow. . . you are free to smile and you are free to have doubts, so long as you give me my space.
I know what I know. Grief is the beginning, not the end.
