Making Peace with Grief

Grief didn't knock on the door or give me any warning that it had taken up residence. It crept in while I wasn't looking and made its home in every recess of my heart, and it waited. Waited for me to notice it was there.

I felt its presence before I knew its name. My life as a functional person, as a mother and wife, slowly ceased to exist. It wasn't until a friend looked into my eyes and heard me describe what I had been experiencing that I started to grasp what was happening to me, to frame it in a way I could understand. I didn't know how it could define me so quickly and pervasively, but at least I knew what to call it.

I've learned that there is no timeline for grief. I was at the gym, listening to a podcast where a woman was giving advice to a mother whose six-year-old son was still trying to process the loss of his father, which had happened when he was three years old. She made sure to emphasize that although the freshness of pain may lessen over time, grief and the loss are always part of the story.

You don't get over grief. It's part of you. This helped me to a certain extent, because I was able to see that this grief I have experienced is not an invasive presence that I am going to be spending the next several months trying to get rid of and forget.

Maybe there is a way to make peace with grief.

To see it not as an intruder, but as another chapter of the story that the Lord is writing for my life. It doesn't mean that I rejoice in it. It doesn't mean that I want more things like this to happen to me. But it does mean that I don't have to feel like the aftermath, the sorrow, the tears, has been a waste.

When grief arrived, it found company. Some of its companions have actually been a part of my story for a very long time. Loss and sorrow woke them from their restless slumber. 

If grief was every breath, then depression was cancer. Counseling and medication and getting out of bed each day was the chemotherapy, and I am still doing chemotherapy, four months later.

The difference is, our culture has a language to talk about cancer. It's not pleasant to discuss, and I'm sure that those who have experience with cancer might be slightly offended that I would compare it to depression on any level. I certainly don't intend to offend, but I think the analogy is helpful, because in the same way that no one would ever blame someone for having cancer, when depression has any part of its source in one's biology and physiology, it is no more one's fault for experiencing it. But most people, especially Christians, don't see depression that way. So instead it is treated like a sin, or, at best, like a disease, but a disease that you brought on yourself.

And so this journey begins with me looking grief and anxiety and depression and all their associated friends straight in the eyes and saying, "I see you. I hear you. I know that you are here. But I will not let this part of my life be any kind of ending point. By God's grace, it will be a beginning of me learning how to live well in the midst of you being here. My hope is not in a cure for a disorder, but in a Person, and he has promised never to leave me or forsake me."