Grief is more than sadness.  It’s a journey through a range of emotions over an indeterminate length of time with the hopeful eventual destination being a place of healing.  A place where you may still hurt from time to time, but you can see a bigger picture.  You can look back and appreciate what you had that was worth grieving, but at the same time, you can look forward with hope to an unknown future.  

Grief applies to any type of loss – a job, a way of life, your dreams for the future…death, divorce.  Grief seems to differ when it’s a sudden, tragic loss versus one you knew to prepare for.  And it’s different to grieve someone who left your life outside of their own choosing versus someone who chose to walk away.  I have grieved the death of grandparents who raised me, the sudden tragic loss of my younger brother, and the miscarriage of two unborn children.   And none of those compared to my husband leaving.  I read once -and it is the absolute truth – “The hardest thing I have ever done was to grieve the loss of a person who is still alive.”

As a psych major, I learned the Kubler-Ross theory of grief, which outlines five stages: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance.  There are other models and ideas, but the bottom line is grief is a process, and it’s different for all of us.  You may skip a stage, linger in one longer than another, or cycle back to one you thought you’d conquered.  In my experience, when you are grieving, you don’t really care about the stages so much as just surviving.  

Some days, survival means getting out of bed.  Some days, it means making it through a task without zoning out, forgetting what you were doing, or being a jumbled mess because your mind is a jumbled mess.  Surviving may mean getting fixed up and getting out of the house, or it may mean sitting alone while your overwhelmed heart seeps out your eyes.  You may experience a multitude of emotions within a day or you may feel completely numb.  You may wake up feeling optimistic and healed, then some unexpected insignificant something may shatter you.  You may feel broken into a million tiny pieces and wonder how to get yourself together.  

You may pull yourself together and see how badly you were wronged.  You may see that you were in the wrong.  You may want to apologize, want an apology, or refuse to hear one without actions backing it.  You may feel simultaneous contradicting things.  You may want to have the lost love back in your life yet never want to see his (or her) face again.  You may miss the way they made you feel yet never again want to feel the way they made you feel.  You may know you’re worth more than the way you were treated yet question your worth and existence.  You may come to understand the fine line between love and hate and realize that you really can’t hate someone without having first loved them deeply, and you probably really don’t hate them so much as the change in them.  That deep grief comes from deep love, and it’s ok to mourn the loss of that kind of love.  

It’s ok to acknowledge your great loss.  

It’s ok to feel all the feelings.  Shock, denial, hurt, sadness, outrage, anger, frustration, resolve, fortification, acceptance, hope.  

Weep when needed.  John Piper says, “Occasionally, weep deeply over the life you hoped would be.  Grieve the losses.  Then wash your face.  Trust God.  And embrace the life you have.”  

There is no time frame and no outline.  It’s an individual process.  Move through it day by day.

Until one day, you feel your soul come back to life.  You feel.  Period.  And you realize you are stronger because of what you’ve suffered.  You are more, not less, because of your grief.