The seasons of grief as we experience them

Photo by Rosie Fraser on Unsplash

Anyone who’s ever grieved can tell you it’s not a linear process. It’s plain messy. There are so many emotions, and so many states of confusion, intermingled with fleeting fancies that never prove real, interwoven through depression and anger, and just so many more indivisible states of being.

We have often thought about trying to use the four seasons with which to describe grief, and indeed we can now frame our grief in these ways in the upcoming Silent Grief Conference.

For us, Autumn represented the shock of a new revelation — those very seconds when you hear words you’re never prepared in yourself to hear as they teem out of the doctor’s mouth. It’s one of those moments you discover is always potentially there, but, you mistakenly think, just happens to other people. We weren’t ready for it, but somehow eternity spoke in that moment, for, because it is now our historical experience, we accept it as our truth. We possess it. Like the giant oak that collapses with a thud on the forest floor that spreads its acorns over a huge distance, our loss God had granted to us, not simply for the pain of death, but to birth new life in us.

Then came winter; that reality of a frost that bit, and, like a steel sword frozen within its leather sheath, it refused to let go. Through the days of our grief there were fragments of time in the winter place. And there were whole inexplicable days. Days of depression, where all life ebbed away. Times we were inconsolable.

Spring is an unusual, albeit welcome, time in the seasons of grief cycle. Suddenly the things we long hoped for come into view, yet usually in the strangest of ways and in manifestations we could never have predicted. This new life that has its genesis out of deferred hope, which can make the heart sick, gives the heart its longest hope, which is the answer to a prayer we have long forgotten to pray. See how God is just so faithful?

Summer is the presence of peace, enjoyed through hope initially, and then through lived experience ultimately. Even though the grief takes far longer to process than we ever realise, it does have its use-by-date. The rawness of grief is ultimately transfigured into a new normal we find palatable.

All the seasons of grief are important, because without autumn we don’t learn the shocking potential that underpins life in a broken world. Without winter we don’t learn to truly depend on God. Without spring we don’t experience the realisation of hope crucial in rewarding and motivating faith. And without full bloom of summer, we don’t live life to its fullest.