Paralysing grief that strikes at any time

Photo by Kristina Tripkovic on Unsplash

Panic attacks, the very first experience of them, teach us something about the nature of a life we never knew existed.

There is a suffering that is deeper and darker than much of humanity typically comprehends.

This is not said to glorify something that ought not to be mentioned. It ought to be mentioned to corroborate the experience of the few.

I recall speaking with a 50-year-old director of a psychology firm — a man with great access to the best psychological resources humanly known — who had never suffered any mental illness. Having experienced an unprecedented failure, something that he could not have foreseen, within days he plummeted into such a sharp depression that panic attacks came as a rude surprise. He lost weight overnight and his face was gaunt. He was beyond words for the hours he had never previously experienced.

For me, I was a 36-year-old when paralysing grief struck at a time that I could not have predicted. I was plunged into a darkness beyond words and comprehension within hours — the nature of an irredeemable loss that couldn’t be denied. And yet, it was months later — five months later to be exact — when I had one paralysing day that couldn’t have been predicted. A day when I almost ended my life, such was the power of feelings that overwhelmed every sensibility of my personal capacity.

You’re shown something in that moment where paralysing grief overwhelms you. There are experiences in life that are completely foreign to our experience of life. Once you have survived these experiences, you’re granted the opening of your eyes. God gets your attention and your life is never the same again. But staying the experience is about resting within good support that is available to you.

You can fight reality all you like, but when loss strikes it takes no prisoners and you quickly find a grievous reality is yours and it lasts and lasts and lasts.

There may be a plethora of ways we can kick against the goads, but each time we find ourselves thrashing in quicksand. To no avail. Sooner or later you realise there is no shortcut to a rectification to your circumstances. And when you would settle for acceptance, even that, for a very long time, is impossible.

Paralysing grief is only experienced by those who 1) have the rug of their lives pulled from under them, and who 2) experience such a poverty of resources to deal with such a tormentingly perplexing reality that they submit to their despair.

But here is a paradox! Not everyone will have the humility to allow such a slide into such an abysmal oblivion. Many, many people will run to a crutch, some form of handle to attach themselves to the scaffold of distraction that saves them from entering transformational grief.

It is no good for someone to sidestep suffering. Insisting upon control in a life situation where there is no control, attempts to delay the inevitable. It is utterly futile, yet so many go there for fear that they will not survive the crushing.

If life throws us a situation that involves paralysing grief, though it seems counterintuitive, we’re blessed to go with it, to suffer the truth of the love we’ve lost, which will crush us again and again, rather than betray the experience by somehow denying our grief.

Denial of the reality of grief is denial of our very identity. We become less when to be transformed by grief would be to become ultimately more.

The promise of grief is the promise of growth.

Suffering the truth of the love we lost crushes us again and again, but in facing a reality of suffering we never knew existed we find resources for hope and recovery we never knew existed.