Litsa Williams & Eleanor Haley

We feel it’s important to clarify up front that when we say we don’t recover from grief we do NOT mean that we don’t recover from the intense pain of loss. I need to tell you that, in the face of significant loss, we don’t “recover” from grief. This isn’t to say that “recovery” doesn’t have a place in grief – it’s simply ‘what’ we’re recovering from that needs to be redefined. To “recover” means to return to a normal state of health, mind, or strength, and as many would attest, when someone very significant dies, we never return to a pre-loss “normal”.

If you know anything about Pauline Boss, the ambiguous grief guru, you know she talks about two (and really more like two and a half) types of ambiguous grief. But Pauline Boss talks about a second, equally as significant, type of ambiguous loss – grieving someone who is physically absent. This ongoing uncertainty, according to Boss’s research of over forty years, shows that this can “prevent resolution of the loss, and freezes the grief process, paralyzing couple and family functioning”. People don’t often don’t know how to acknowledge grief when someone has died, and they certainly don’t know how to acknowledge and support it in the cases of adoption or incarceration or almost anything else on the list.

A while ago, we wrote an article about the need for self-compassion in grief. At the time, we defined self-compassion and we made a case for the ‘what’ and the ‘why’, but we didn’t get into a lot of detail about the ‘how’

After someone you love dies, almost all “blessed events” thereafter become a mix of happy-type emotions and sad-type emotions. In the midst of celebrations for graduations, promotions, new homes, engagements, marriages, births, grandbabies, big wins, and little wins – you may find your mind wandering from your present-moment elation to contemplate the thought “I wish [insert loved one’s name] we’re here”