Grief is a multi-faceted human response to loss. Grief work emphasizes that grief is a process that we engage in as active participants. Grief work involves a step-by-step process through which a grieving person walks in order to reach a place of emotional healing. The better your understanding of grief and how it is healed, the better equipped you’ll be to help a bereaved friend or family member.

Source: Halili, R.G; Gotiangco, E.G (2018) Journeying through Loss, Grief, Hope, and Recovery. Quezon City, Wingspread Publishing

• Grieving is not an illness. It is a way for our bodies to process loss. It is part of the human experience. When we love deeply, we will grieve deeply for the love that is no longer present.

• Grieving is not a passive experience. It requires us to feel emotions at a very deep level. In our grief, we enter into a journey of discovery, of “becoming” what we have never been before as our sense of self shifts and evolves.

• We enter into a “meaning making” place, searching to define our place in the world. We can acknowledge that our stories do not end with loss. They are carried into new experiences and understandings of ourselves and others.

• It’s normal to feel sad, numb, or angry following a loss. But as time passes, these emotions should become less intense as you accept the loss and start to move forward. If you aren’t feeling better over time, or your grief is getting worse, it may be a sign that your grief has developed into a more serious problem, such as complicated grief or major depression.

• The bereaved needs reassurance that what he or she feels is normal. Don’t judge them or take his or her grief reactions personally.

• Grief may involve extreme emotions and behaviors. Feelings of guilt, anger, despair, and fear are common, A grieving person may yell to the heavens, obsess about death, lash out at loved ones, or cry for hours on end.

• Grief takes as long as it takes. There is no set timetable for grieving. For many people, recovery after bereavement takes 18 to 24 months, but for others, the grieving process may be longer or shorter.

• Don’t pressure the bereaved to move on or make them feel like they’ve been grieving too long. This can slow the healing process.

• Grief as waves that come and go. Some days, the water is more turbulent or stormy, but on the other days, there is a sense of calm and quiet lapping on the shore. Like the waves, grief has no endpoint. We can experience intense feelings of loss years after death. Sometimes, these feelings are triggered by a special date, event, or a significant time of the year, like the holiday season. Sometimes the  trigger can be a song you hear on the radio, or a smell, or a passing thought.

• Grief as a cut. Experiencing the death of someone significant to us can be compared to experiencing the cut. The more significant and complex the relationship, the more severe the cut will be.

• In order to heal from the cut, and work through our grief, we need to heal from the inside out, layer by layer. This usually requires keeping the cut open and exposed. This process can be quite painful.

• In grief, we may attempt to avoid the pain by keeping busy, minimizing our loss or avoiding reminders of the person who has died. This is human. However, this avoidance sometimes causes the cut to become infected and we need to reopen it. This can be painful - so can grief!

• As a cut often leaves a scar, the scar is symbolic of the fact that the death has permanently changed us is some way.

• While we don’t get over our losses, we do learn to live with them. Our painful feelings don’t steadily decline to zero, but rather, we start to experience these painful feelings less often over time. At the same time, we are working at integrating our loss experience. We learn more about our thoughts and feelings associated with the person who died and we find a place for them within ourselves. This is a subtle process and just as we may not be able to say when we exactly “came out of the fog”, we also can’t pinpoint when we were able to reinvest our emotional energy into living more fully.