Dropping the Double-Mindedness in Grief

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

There is a fact about grief, especially grief that comes as a relationship ends, that sends us into double-mindedness. We would say there is no favour in the loss of a loved one, but at least that grief is final. They’re not coming back, shocking as that is.

I recall when my first marriage ended, there was a truth there that I could not yet handle. It was over. It took me nine months of trying everything to change my life, but my former wife was done, and that is the way of grief — she was long over hers, and mine, due to my ignorance, had only just begun.

It took me those nine months, and countless conversations with myriads of people in all kinds of situations and places, as I searched for a way to put the marriage back together, to understand what I could have understood straight away if I weren’t so emotionally invested.

That’s the trouble. We are. Our emotional investment is our all. We’ve given the relationship all we have. Perhaps we haven’t even realised exactly how ‘all in’ we are. Now we know, because the war exists between the logical mind and a heart that cannot let go. The heart pulls the mind in the direction of ‘do not give up here, we can win this!’ — in the vast majority of cases we cannot. The other person is done.

Dropping the double-mindedness of grief is a major challenge. It’s fatiguing and exhausting.

The first thing we must realise is that grief is its very own master. It always takes longer, much longer, than we’re comfortable enduring. We would have it over as soon as possible. But it takes months. And in so many cases it can take a year, or even years, with certain aspects unresolved.

Accepting the double-mindedness, and not getting angry with ourselves, is important. The double-mindedness of flipping-flopping thinking is its own sign of our grief — a mind that wants to let go, but cannot, tussling with a heart that knows it must let go, but cannot.

Double-mindedness in grief is the sign of crisis.
In the land of indecision, grief takes its toll.

It seems counter-intuitive, but the only way to drop double-mindedness is to stop judging it. It’s painful, and it costs us our peace, but it is what it is, and we need to allow ourselves this time.

We would either allow anyone else time to adjust or we would wonder why they keep rehashing things.

It’s the same for ourselves. We try to straddle two incredibly diverse poles and hold them as truths simultaneously. That’s impossible to do, but that’s the task grief gives us.

Accepting that it is over is the hardest thing to do.
Inevitably, however, as we let go of our struggle to let go,
we do ultimately let go.

In the in-between time after the shock of loss has hit but before grief is resolved we’re catapulted between two poles, thrown from one to another — it’s over, no it isn’t, it’s over, no it isn’t.