Part
2 of “Time and Grief” by Pat Schwiebert, R.N. – Executive Director, Grief Watch
FIRST TIMES
It is natural for us to gauge our life
after a loss as we anticipate and then go through the first times—first day,
the first week, the first month, the first time we venture out in public, the
first time we went back to school, or church, or work, the first summer, the
first Christmas, the first vacation, the first time we laughed. These first
times are like benchmarks, notches in our belt that prove we are surviving when
we weren’t sure we wanted to, or didn’t know we could.
DINNERTIME
There’s an empty chair at the table.
There’s the conversation that seems to be just noise, having little to do with
the absent one about whom we are all thinking but not daring to speak. We still
prepare more food than we now need because we haven’t yet figured out how to
cook for one less person. Sometimes the food seems to have no taste, and is not
able to do what we want it to do—to fill that huge hole within us.
TIME OUT
Sometimes what we need to do is to take
a time out from our regular activities to reflect on what has happened to our
personal world, as we knew it before our great loss. To do so is not to run
away from life but simply to realize that to act as if nothing has happened
doesn’t work. This loss is too big to allow us to pretend that it hasn’t had a
big impact on us. It’s in the quiet time, when we shut off our thinking, others
will have to be okay with our need to bow out for a while. Remember that during
grief our job is to take care of ourselves, not to take care of our friends. When
it’s time to re-enter a normal routine, it’s our choice what we will reinstate
and what we decide to lay aside. Loss tends to redefine our priorities. What
used to be important may not be as important now. And that’s not necessarily a
bad thing.
Time heals what reason cannot. In the
end, time will change things. The intensity we experience when grief is new,
where we can see nothing but our loss, and where every moment is filled with
thoughts of the one who died will gradually diminish and become softer. Time
forces the big picture of life back into our vision whether we like it or not.
This happens in our lives all the time. Remember how when we first fell in love
with someone, we were totally preoccupied with only that other person, until
gradually a more balanced existence was restored. Or when we did (what we
thought was) some terrible thing and we were sure everybody would never let us
forget it, we came to find out a few months down the road that most people had
forgotten the incident. In the months (maybe years) following a loss, life will
eventually start to re-emerge, and life on this planet will once again seem
possible. This will not happen because we come to understand the death more
clearly but because, with the passage of time, the unanswered questions will
become easier to live with.
Time will not remove grief entirely. The
scars of our grief will remain and we may find ourselves ambushed by a fresh
wave of grief at any time. But needing to know the answers to the “why”
questions won’t seem quite so important as it once was.
Time is a gift that we have taken for
granted. We’ve been given our lives one moment at a time. This is good.
