Adele came into my office having had a hard week. Her husband had died a year ago. She had said a few weeks ago that she thought she was coping better but now, the car needed work and there was some confusion re finishing up his last tax return and all this felt like too much. She cried saying, “I just miss him.” Her heart hurt and she wondered if this pain in her chest would last forever. She wondered if grieving would be her operating system for the rest of her life.
Grieving clients often ask the question, “How long does this take?” Grief feels so heavy and all consuming that they just want the pain to stop. My answer always comes from the lovely book A Time To Grieve by Carol Staudacher. The book is a series of mostly one-page readings, poignant reflections on various aspects of grief and grieving. In the reading called “How do you know you’re healed“ she first quotes William Shakespeare “What wound would ever heal but by degrees” and then goes on to explain that when we have a physical injury, we don’t expect it to heal quickly. We are prepared to observe the process and see incremental change. But somehow, we (all) think differently when we have what she calls “surgery of the heart”. We expect to wake up one morning and find ourselves healed and ready to resume life — at least somewhat as it was before. We don’t, as my friend who broke her leg a year ago say, “the bones are healed but the muscles are still weak”. We expect all our parts to come together and HEAL, dammit.
Our modern expectations don’t help. Often people are expected to be back at work, back to optimal functioning, long before they are ready. “Your mother died?” “See you at the office next week?”. There seems to be limited understanding in our structures that our healing is very much tied to what kind of relationship we had with that person. And, that even if the relationship was a difficult one, we may still need to spend time grieving our hopes and dreams that this relationship could change.
So, when one loses a spouse, there should be no expectation on anyone’s part that healing will happen quickly. And yet there is. You expect yourself to heal quicker than you will and others will stop asking how you’re doing, expecting that you ARE healed already. You were, regardless of the quality of the relationship, bound together and uncoupling, whether by death or divorce is a process. And that process takes how ever much time it takes. There is simply no map with Estimate Time of Arrival flashing in the corner.
As a grief counsellor, I always recommend journaling as part of the healing process. Most clients resist this idea at first. I go on to explain that not only does writing out our experience release emotional pressure — that is, we can be hurt, angry and saw whatever we want in our journals — but that our journals can serve as concrete markers for our healing process. My own experience of heartache was measured by a row of cheap scribblers that were, in fact, scribbled in. When I thought I had plateaued and was no longer making progress, all I had to do was grab one and read what I had written on today’s date in that year and I could see I was moving forward, albeit incrementally.
Staudacher concludes by saying, “We must trust the process of grief and know that, even though I may not think or feel that I am making any progress, healing is taking place within me.” We heal by degrees, not really aware that we are healing but it is in looking back that we can see we are in a different place, a different emotional space, than we were a week, a month, or a year ago.
Resource: A Time to Grieve
Other recommended books can be found HERE.
