I've been feeling a little bit lately like someone, or something, is in the room with me wherever I go. This presence is not menacing, it is not there to scare me or cause me harm. Rather, it sits and it watches, patiently waiting for me to take notice. There is no hand waiving or noise making. No effort to alert me or demand my attention.
But it is there.
And it remains with me, constantly. Like a small child who is used to being ignored but is waiting for the right moment, any moment, to be noticed, to be seen. It is constantly at my heels and hovers in the corner of every room I enter, and like an absentminded parent, I let it be seen without really seeing it at all.
I've come to recognize this companion as grief.
You see, we all experience grief whether we recognize it for what it is or not. Some therapists would argue that all therapy is really grief therapy, mourning the loss that has accompanied our suffering in even the smallest of ways. I have found this to be true, both in my own life as well as in the lives of my clients. We have all lost something, and will continue in this manner for the rest of our lives.
For some, they feel that the purpose of counseling is to be happy. I'm afraid this isn't so. For many, pain is as present as breathing, more common than not. Bodies are breaking. Violence is spreading. Humanity is familiar with the ache of despair and the echoing of injustice, the hollowness of loss and the seeming absence of a God who cares.
These clients come to therapy to be fixed, but in reality what they are really seeking is to be healed.
And in the same way, I want to see my grief as a problem to be solved. But I am learning that its presence in my life is not to bring me harm, but to bring me healing. If my heart feels like it's being smashed into a thousand pieces, that's because it is, and because it should be. If we are not allowing our eyes to see and our souls to feel the deep wounds that are being carved into humanity every day then we are not honoring ourselves or the people around us.
Grief lingers because it needs to be heard in order to bring about healing.
Grief is waiting for my attention, and when I fully face it, when I sit down and say "I'm ready now" grief pauses, looks at me with knowing eyes, full of tenderness and firmly says:
I've been watching you for some time, the way you go about your day, the pauses you take when the feelings are trying to fight their way out, the busyness you wrap around yourself so that this doesn't happen. I see you in pain. I see the way you listen to those around you, the way your eyes meet those who are suffering for a moment and the familiarity of this emotion even as it passes you by. I see you welcome others but just as quickly push them out. I see your heart breaking a million times over for every person around you and I see you sink back into yourself when you feel your powerlessness is too much, I see you covering your eyes and your ears when you feel the burden is too great to carry. I see you holding in the bad and trying to scrape together good, little by little as if you could make something of it, anything of it, if you just try hard enough. I see you working to make yourself presentable to those around you, I see you striving so hard to be worthy, to be valuable, to be whole. I see the hate you feel and the pride you hold and the selfishness you use to keep yourself from having to be responsible, the chaos you make because you feel so much, so much, all the time and wished desperately that you didn't.
I see you.
And I have news.
I am here to hold your hand and help you through. I am here because you have not numbed yourself out, I am here for a reason. And you can run and you can hide and you can ignore me but I will be here waiting for you until you lend me your ear and listen. Because you are right, this world is a mess and you are too. But you must not, you cannot, stop there.
You see, my friend hope is also here. Also waiting, also sitting with you in the dark. And hope knows that there will be times of mourning, times where you think you will not be able to pick yourself up off the floor, times where you will believe that the next step is simply not possible, not even probable, given the circumstances. It will seem like there will never be light again.
But you see, grief cannot exist without light because grief expands into the darkness that light has left behind, it lets us know that something has died and that we need to honor this loss and respond.
Grief shows us where healing needs to begin.
So.
These days, I'm leaning into my grief, with hope, to better understand how to move forward. I'm listening to what grieves me in order to make space for healing, both in my own life and in the lives of those around me. I am recognizing that life will bring me many, many forms of sorrow, and that my purpose is not to tidily fix what is broken, but to grieve what has been lost.
In the words of Viktor Frankl, author of Man's Search for Meaning and Holocaust survivor, we "must not lose hope but should keep [our] courage in the certainty that the hopelessness of our struggle [does] not detract from its dignity and its meaning".
We will face losses, big and small, this much is certain.
Let grief come.
Invite her in. Respect her pain because it is meaningful. She may not always make sense and you may not always know how to respond but just start where you are because you can't go backwards and you can't skip ahead.
You can only hold her hand and say,
"I'm here. Go ahead. I'm listening."
