Almost a year ago, I got the call. We’ve all either gotten that call or dread the day when we will. I was enjoying a lazy Sunday afternoon and unloading groceries from my car when my phone rang. I expected a pleasant, meandering conversation to hear all the latest updates from my family. Instead, I heard the words that I had been dreading for years: “Auntie Bea died.” I tried to wrap my head around how my whole world could change with only three words. After I hung up the phone, bags of groceries remained on the floor while I sat down in a dark living room and tried to grapple with the news. The next several weeks felt like an eternity – the rest of the world continued to move about at lightning speed, but mine had stopped turning. My body attended Zoom calls for work, but my mind was in a far-off land, flip-flopping between heavy tears and even heavier numbness. How could I live in a world where she didn’t? How could I hold on to the small pieces of her that I had in recipe books or jewelry boxes? How could I nurture the part of myself that she had inspired?
This is grief. It is a heavy and complex emotional process that is hard to understand and even harder to walk through. There’s a reason it feels so unnatural: we were never meant to live in a world with so much death. God didn’t intend our world to have such excruciating endings and such abrupt separations. We were meant to dwell with one another, be close to one another, and enjoy the presence of those we love forever. Through Christ’s death and resurrection, He made a way for this to happen, but in the meantime, we are left suffering through the remnants of death and despair that plague our everyday lives. In the midst of such a complex mourning, it’s easy to believe lies about ourselves or even about the grieving process. So, after it became more personal to me this year, I am writing this post to dispel common myths about grief and shine a light on the truth that just might surprise you.
Myth #1: Grief is the same as sadness.
Grief is not one singular emotion. It’s a complex web of feelings that are often difficult to untangle. This is especially true when you feel conflicting emotions. You may miss a loved one and also be angry at them for hurting you at the same time. You might be sad about a loss but feel relieved at the same time. Grief can feel even more weighty when we moralize the emotions we feel and condemn ourselves based on arbitrary standards of what we think we should be feeling. The best (but not easiest) way to approach grief is to allow the feelings to wash over you like a wave in the ocean, notice that they are there, and then let them pass in whatever timing your body needs.
Myth #2: Grief is about death.
We often associate grief with death, funerals, and mourning, but this complex emotion can arise in a variety of life circumstances. You can grieve a relationship that has changed or shifted. You can grieve a life change or transition. You can mourn the death of a dream or the death of an old version of yourself. Greif is simply the acknowledgment of a loss and the complex emotions that come with mourning what was lost and missing what used to be – whether that’s a person, a dream, an idea, a friendship, or a career. There is no right or wrong time for grief to surface. Sometimes, it comes unexpectedly when you’ve moved into a different season of life and didn’t realize you missed the old version. And sometimes, the appearance of grief is very straightforward with a death, a divorce, a betrayal, or even the loss of a job. If you have faced loss, it’s best not to press forward or rush to the next season without acknowledging the loss and processing the related emotions.
Myth #3: Grief is predictable.
We’ve all heard of the five stages of grief, but too often, we misinterpret this helpful framework as a common formula. Rather than a step-by-step process, the five stages are meant to help us verbalize and understand the range of emotions that may surface in the process of grieving a loss. You might feel denial, anger, bargaining, depression, or acceptance. However, this is not a comprehensive list and it’s not a roadmap to move from point A to point B either. You may feel a range of other emotions. You may start off in depression and later go into denial. You may feel them all at once, or you may feel completely numb. Grief is not predictable. It comes in waves, and it shows up in different ways, even within the same person. So approach your grieving process with curiosity and a spirit of discovery. This is a side of yourself you may not be well acquainted with, but don’t suppress it. Instead, invite whatever emotions arise and process them one day (or one moment) at a time.
Myth #4: Time heals all wounds.
When people are suffering, we love our platitudes. And though they all have a nugget of truth to them, they aren’t always accurate or helpful. When people talk about grief, they often say that the first year is the hardest and it will get better with time. For some, this is accurate, but for many, it reinforces the idea that grief has a timeline. When we think there’s a timeline, we try to push through and white-knuckle it until we can move past it. But for many, grief is not something you simply move past. Instead, it becomes a familiar friend. It reappears during holidays or significant events. It peeks through mundane moments and everyday tasks where we weren’t expecting to see it. Sometimes, it simply knocks at our door on a random Tuesday ten years down the road. So the goal is not to “get past” grief but to learn how to ride the wave and process the emotions wherever and whenever our familiar friend chooses to say hello.
Myth #5: You can’t grieve something you never had.
Greif about the death of a loved one feels more concrete than other types of grief. When we tell a friend or coworker that someone died, they have an understanding of the emotions we’re feeling. There’s a concrete event that we can point to. However, there are many forms of grief that don’t have this same concrete nature, which makes them more complex to process. It is possible to grieve something that never happened or a person we never met. It’s possible to grieve a hope or a dream that never came to pass. It’s possible to grieve even in a waiting season when we’re unsure if the desire will be fulfilled or not. It is very common for older people to look back on long and full lives and grieve roads they never went down or things they never tried. And it’s also very common for parents-to-be to grieve a lost pregnancy or the loss of infertility even though they never met their child or potential child. Grieving takes many forms for many different reasons, but these are all valid reasons to mourn, even if it’s not as concrete or final as the death of a relative or friend.
The Truth about Grief
Greif isn’t easy, but it is inevitable. If it hasn’t hit close to home yet, it will. But the Bible has a surprising amount of wisdom to share with us about this topic. I love Paul’s words in 1 Thessalonians 4:13-14 as expressed in the Message version:
“And regarding the question, friends, that has come up about what happens to those already dead and buried, we don’t want you in the dark any longer. First off, you must not carry on over them like people who have nothing to look forward to, as if the grave were the last word. Since Jesus died and broke loose from the grave, God will most certainly bring back to life those who died in Jesus.”
A few verses later, it describes the joyous party we have to look forward to when death is no longer the great separator: “Oh, we’ll be walking on air! And then there will be one huge family reunion with the Master.”
Now, that is good news! Our grief and sadness are temporary symptoms of living in a world that isn’t how it was supposed to be! Revelation 21:4 gives us a promise we can cling to, even in grief: “He will wipe away every tear from their eyes, and death shall be no more, neither shall there be mourning, nor crying, nor pain anymore, for the former things have passed away.”
So don’t grieve like those who have no hope – let your grief lift your eyes to the One who walks with you in death and in life!
