You’re Not Crazy (or Weird), You’re Grieving

Losing someone you love vaults you headfirst into the unknown. 

Yes, we understand intellectually that we are mortal beings, that no-one lives forever, that if we open our hearts to love we make ourselves vulnerable to loss. Yet there is an existential crisis at the heart of every experience of death when we suddenly realize that someone who has been such an integral part of our lives – is gone. Our minds may tell us that this is true but our spirits struggle mightily to understand.

When my soul mate and beloved sister Joanie died after a three year struggle with cancer, I had no illusions about what to expect. I knew that she was sick, I knew that she was dying, I was there as it was happening. But it was the “gone” that got me, that shook me to the depths of my soul. 

Where WAS she? For weeks I expected the phone to ring and her voice to be on the other end. My spirit felt that surely, I would awake one morning only to discover that it had all been an awful nightmare. As a minister, I had more experience with illness and death than many, so I mistakenly thought that I was “ready.” But nothing could prepare me for the empty space where previously there had been someone so real, so alive, so loved and so integral to my heart, my soul and my life.  

As a young woman I ministered to (facing her own death) put it “It’s so weird to ‘be’ and to contemplate ‘not being!’” As mortal beings, we can only know and love this world while what is beyond remains a great, unknowable mystery. A large part of early grieving is adjusting to this profound existential “tear” in the fabric of our being, trying to adjust to the sudden shock to our system as we wonder what on earth has just happened?   

In times and places where death is more common and more a part of our daily lives, human beings have always had rituals of grief and mourning to help us with this adjustment. In Victorian days, people wore mourning clothes for an extended period of time or tucked a lock of their beloved’s hair into a locket to wear forever next to their heart. All over the world and in all cultures, people have ways of expressing their enduring connection to those they have lost, whether by symbol or ritual, by signs in the natural world or spiritual realm or by what their religions teach them.  

Yet in modern Western society, we gather to support and comfort, but only for a short while. Then, once the casseroles have all been eaten and all the sympathy cards have been opened, everyone else goes back to their normal lives and too often people are often left on their own, trying to make sense of the gaping hole that has suddenly opened up in their lives. Yet our need to express the profound shock we feel at the sudden absence of our beloved is as ancient as it is real. A young man I ministered to who lost both his parents in the space of a year said to me “I wish I could wear a black dress so people would know I am not OK.” 

Without the benefit of a culture that understands and normalizes loss and grief, and often without a community around us to help, we bereaved struggle to make sense of what has happened. Here are just a few of the things that grieving people have done that they’ve shared with me over the years:

While many of the things we do in our earliest throes of grief are intensely personal and intimate (and not often shared) they don’t mean you are crazy or are coming emotionally undone. They simply mean that your psyche has suffered a huge existential shock and is trying to make sense of it. 

So whatever you need to do, or find yourself doing, be gentle with yourself and suspend judgement for a while. Nothing that you need to do is weird or strange or inappropriate. In fact, chances are there are thousands, perhaps millions of people around the world who have done or are doing exactly the same. Your spirit knows what you need to do to come to terms with what has happened and, over time and with a lot of love and support, you will find your way. 

The poet Mary Oliver writes in her poem “Wild Geese”