POV: Grief brings life when the right people show up.
You’re scrolling through your social feeds… it’s brimming with newness:
new job, new relationship status, new baby, pet, house… the energy is celebratory, highlighting the moments and milestones of surprise and delight. This is the catalog of what’s remembered by the watching followers…
Insert: __(engagements, weddings, honeymoons and anni photos, big trips and family vacations, career path changes and job news, big move or home purchase, baby announcements, new fur babies, good times with good people etc.)__
Additions to life— in whatever form they take—are ripe for praise, quickly solicited and met just as swiftly with declarations of congratulations and pure exhilaration, glory uninhibited.
Good news is significant in more ways than one… Individually, it’s exciting and soul-stirring, highlighting the best of life on earth… In society, good news is a straightforward invitation to shower adoration on those we love or those we admire from afar in the echoing chorus of joy. Because joy comes naturally, sharing our own good news or reveling in someone else’s feels automatic almost-- sensible, unfussy, and wholesome… warm and comforting as it points us outside of ourselves and towards something higher, something worth living for.
Our great news is more than an answered prayer or a dream come true… it points to fulfillment, purpose, and meaning that’s anchored to something outside of ourselves… the best news is proof that there is more to experience, to hope for that maybe we’ve yet to see. We’re eager to share in others’ delights and thrills... these are feelings that beckon the most amenable responses we have to offer… there’s a fervor in sharing hope realized because it is part of all of us.
Celebration is something we can all get behind, and all participate in… We love to welcome the additions that life gifts us… It seems to be a condition of our spirits we’re all imprinted with even when we can’t totally agree (at least all the time) on what is truly good and worthy of celebrating. Our propensity to celebrate, to praise, to make much life’s highlights in good company points to something, I think… it’s a taste of the adoration and worship we’re hardwired for, a kind that surpasses life as we know it here… it also points to our human nature to share life, to do life together. You don’t celebrate alone, after all.
What about when the tide goes out, though, and energy downshifts or even ceases—bad news… sad news… gut-wrenching news.
Subtractions: __(ex-partner or divorce, death, loss of a job, estranged family members, miscarriages, your dog dies, a lifelong friend walks away with no explanation…)___
Loss in life doesn’t get the same spotlight nor does it elicit the same sense of communal clamor that celebration does. The echo chamber of grief is often quiet, reverberating silence. People don’t know what to say, so they don’t say anything. They don’t know what act of kindness would be “enough” or welcomed, so they freeze… this paralyzing fear of insufficiency from one’s community leaves the one enduring the ache feeling empty, numb, and alone on an unfamiliar island of uncertainty with no end in sight… the burden of grief is carried along day after day as is the lie that you’re better off on your own… no one cares, no one understands, maybe even no one remembers.
Often, grief and loss tend to draw out a slower, more thoughtful crowd of friends… and strangers. You know this from experience, I’m sure… Sorrow and loss necessitate a more subtle, nuanced response that meets the unknown and uncertain head-on, welcoming the mystery that walks with grief.
People experiencing loss don’t need your assurance, they need your presence right now. They don’t need your promises that things will get better soon, that everything happens for a reason, or that it’ll all make sense one day…
Hear me, while you are entitled to your perspective, that person is aching for living proof that their loss doesn’t make them unloveable— you are the proof. They are aching to see that you will still stand by them and weather their storm with them—not as a bystander or observer but as a willing participant.
When we endure painful seasons, we need presence, not other people’s fix-it/solve-it/make-sense-of-it or explain-it-away mentality. When we offer our witness and presence to someone else’s hard and hold space for them to be overwhelmed, brokenhearted, angry, or even sad, we face our own discomfort in the process… and we change, too.
No one heals by being told what or how to think. People heal by being loved well. Loving anything requires intentionality, integrity, and vulnerability… But it starts with just being willing to be uncomfortable with uncertainty.
No matter the circumstance or series of events that preceded their loss, everyone, all people, want to feel seen, not forgotten, held, not given your personal prescription for how to feel better soon…
Your practice of presence > piety is hope embodied.
We all are searching for hope, somewhere, whether we are aware of it or not. You could be someone’s signpost to look up and get curious about love’s source.
… (to be continued) …