One of the hardest things that anybody can go through in life, is to lose somebody else. We are not designed to be singular beings, as humans. We are designed to love, laugh, care, to fall for people around us and bring them into our circles. Whether you have lost a parent, a sibling, a child, a friend – it really doesn’t matter who you have lost, you need to know how to grieve.
Some people feel stuck when they have lost somebody. That initial numb, unbelievable feeling that this person is never gonna be there ever again is tough to reconcile. It’s understandable that people feel like the whole world has ground to a halt, but the thing is, the world around them still moves. When somebody dies, somebody takes their home, the job, the place in the world they once stood and the world keeps moving forward – even if your world is standing still. Some people get angry after the death of a loved one. And that’s a normal response to the grief that they are feeling. They may speak to wrongful death attorneys, scream into the void, isolate themselves for a long time. They may need somebody to blame for this death, even if it wasn’t anybody else’s fault. Grief takes time. No matter how many therapists you speak to, how many times you speak their name, it’s only time that will make it okay again that the world has changed irreversibly.
Death is not a comfortable topic. We spend our whole lives being suppressed, told to be quiet when we are sad, told not to cry, told to stop crying. There are so many ways we suppress our emotions when it comes to death. The thing is, this is a missed message. Death is a natural part of life and it comes to every single person, no matter what, no matter when, no matter how – we are all going to die. The best thing that anybody can do, is become comfortable with the idea and learn how to manage the feelings that come with it when you lose someone close to you.
Grief isn’t something that’s over and done within five minutes and grief is something that takes a different length of time for every person experiencing it. For some people when somebody dies they don’t grieve they celebrate. They celebrate life, the love, memories – they don’t tend to be sad for the loss, but happy for the life that once was. There is no right way, or wrong way to grieve for somebody else. But we do have three tips and suggestions to help you to get through it.
- Think about your loss. It’s going to be painful and it’s going to hurt every nerve ending in your body. Grief can be as physical as being punched in the car. Making an effort to consider the person you have lost, the value in your life, and what it means for them no longer to be with you any more, is important. You need to give yourself a chance to deal with this loss, and hiding away from it is not going to help you. Making a conscious decision to think about the loss and the gravity of the situation, it’s going to help you to process and move forward. You may think you will never move forward without this person in your life any more, but I promise you will.
- Feel the pain. When somebody is close to you and they die, it’s common to want to run. To run away from reality, to literally put your trainers on and run down the street and work every single bit of pain away from your body. But this isn’t going to help you – not in the long run, anyway. The only way to make the pain go away is to feed it. You have to process it and you can get through it when you face the pain you need to go through. It’s a process, to go through losing somebody, you have to get through that process don’t fight against it.
Schedule your grief. This may sound like a crazy idea. Scheduling your grief sounds like something impossible to do, but it is very possible and allows you to take control of your feelings. Grief can be so consuming that you end up unable to feel at all. You might stop eating, sleeping, and stop taking care of yourself in general. The best thing that you can do, it’s schedule your grief. Go to work, go to school, be with your children – and then when the day is done give yourself an allotted amount of time to just cry. To feel the pain, to remember the memories, just think about that person and let yourself become consumed by it. But only for that scheduled time. Once you’re done, distract yourself enough to be forced out of that grief and put it back in its box for the next day. Life is going to move along whether you like it or not this way you are in control.
