“Grief is crippling; an experience tearing and shredding your soul, your
deepest core... it hits like a tidal wave, throws us upside down/inside out...
and you still have to deal with life.”
— Viv
Harvey
DEFINITIONS like the one above,
descriptions of such deep and unrelenting anguish, juxtaposed with the reality
that ‘life goes on!’, decree that life is a lot harder for some than it is for
others.
Grief normally has something of a journey
about it. We traverse a chasm without knowing beforehand its length. This is
both frightening and frustrating. It’s a period of identity obliteration or
deformation, and it takes longer than we ever expect it for our souls’ reformation
to occur. Of course, soul reformation is about doing much grief work. Grief
occurs amidst a flurry of highly intensive emotions of all kinds, predominantly
negative, and most of them severely debilitating. The intensity of grief lasts
a certain time – months, a year at most.
But some grief lasts... and lasts... and
lasts a lifetime.
The Ambiguity in Lifelong, Unreconciled
Grief
Within psychological science there is the
phenomenon of ambiguous grief – a sort of grief that is as palpable as it is
intangible. It is arresting yet irresolvable. This is a lose-lose situation.
It is very hard, perhaps impossible within
one’s perception, to fully recover from such grief. In some cases it involves
the reliving of trauma. In others it is simply the case that a certain
ever-groaning sadness is inescapable. Probably in most cases of ambiguous grief
it is difficult to control the pendulum as it swings between these two
manifestations.
Hope... through Enabled Management of Life
But there is hope as we move our
perspective from a state of acknowledged yet debilitating sadness to a state of
enabled management of life.
We have our minds and we have our hearts –
our spiritual possessions of capacity. We are good guides for ourselves when we
are open to the revelation of the Holy Spirit – for only we can say how we truly
feel.
Enabled management of life
within a person’s ambiguous grief, it seems to me, to be about accepting the
continuity of the affliction (the rolling flux of good days – bad days – good
days, etc) and simply managing it through an ever-growing-and-abounding suite
of coping tools. Such coping tools include exercises, routines of peace, hope,
and joy, connection with mentors, nature connection, desiring God, prayer and
silence focused on eternity, etc.
Enabled management of life is
the gift, also, of an enhanced form of living. This is about the belief that we
have been scourged for a reason – a purpose. This is not about resentment. If
it is, we are rendered useless for the Kingdom. But even in resentment we may
bring glory to God. No, enabled management
of life is about two core things: 1) knowing
a spiritual enablement that means 2) we can manage our lives with the Spirit’s help. Power is experienced
despite the pain.
***
If we believe these words, then they have
power. There is no power where there is no belief. But words also have to be
true. We will only believe what we know within ourselves to be truth, as we
encamp with God’s Spirit and he confirms it.
***
Some experiences of grief are irresolvable.
Such unresolved soul-loss can, however, be managed in an enabling way, though
it is never ‘easy’. Sufferers ought to be treated with compassion and grace and
kindness.
© 2013 S. J. Wickham.
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