Monday, April 09, 2007

Good Grief…
What if you don’t mourn?

By Jo Winkowitsch email: jowink55@milfordcable.com


A friend suggested I write about what it looks like when one doesn’t mourn. At first, I thought that was a silly thing to spend time on. It seemed that it would be obvious to everyone what it would look like or feel like to not be able to mourn or grieve. I have wanted my articles to focus on what might help people find comfort and help on their grief journey, and this just didn’t seem to fit.

But the more I have thought about it, the more I wondered if this might not, in fact, be a very good subject to discuss here with you. Some of us seem to struggle with mourning. Mourning is the outward expression of an inward reality. Jesus said in Matt. 5: 4, “Blessed are those who mourn, for they shall receive comfort.” Some of the most important goals of mourning are to find comfort and hope in a very difficult and painful place, to understand and endure the losses that death has caused, and to find your new way in the life that you now face.

If you read these columns and are seeking to deal with your grief, then you may be unable to relate to what I am about to write. But possibly there is one of you reading who needs to consider what you have done with your pain and the sadness which came as a result of a death of someone you loved. Do you feel emotionally constipated?

Come with me, if you will, to consider what Martha M. Tousley of http://www.groww.org/ has to say about how people will grieve:
“Thinkers experience and speak of their grief intellectually and physically. Remaining strong, dispassionate and detached in the face of powerful emotions, they may speak of their grief in an intellectual way, thus appearing to others as cold and uncaring, or as having no feeling at all.
Feelers experience a full, rich range of emotions in response to grief. Since they feel strong emotions so deeply, they're less able to rationalize and intellectualize the pain of grief, and more likely to appear overwhelmed and devastated by it.
Still others may experience profound grief and have very strong feelings about it, but for one reason or another are unable or unwilling to express it. ”

Do you recognize yourself in one of the descriptions? If you are a thinker who won’t or can’t think, or you are a feeler who won’t or can’t let yourself feel, or for some reason you are unwilling to express your emotions or deal with your pain, what do you think will happen? How have you dealt with your grief? I’d like you to ponder that a bit.

Some of you might be thinking right now, “I am doing very fine without wallowing in my pain or falling apart, thank you very much.” If that is true of you, then please know I acknowledge that you get to choose how you ride out your own roller coaster of grief. If you are doing fine, then I am glad for you. But just perhaps one of you is someone who, for some reason, won’t even acknowledge the ride exists because of a past loss or huge pain.

You might be more like the person who chooses to put everything away that reminds you of your loved one, so you don’t have to think about them or miss them. Sometimes you might think that you don’t miss them anymore or don’t even feel the pain of loss. But try to talk about them, or think about them and what happens, are you overwhelmed with pain and sadness? Does that convince you all the more that you should not think about or talk about the one who has left you?

Are you like the man who knows how many days it has been since his beloved wife died 10 years ago? He reads her journals for long periods every day and his life revolves around missing her. He says he knows his grief is stuck in only being sad but he chooses to not move on with life. It is just too painful to think that life might go on without his partner constantly at his side all day.

After the fog of shock and denial lifted at the beginning of your grief, you might have been flooded with unfamiliar or too familiar feelings that paralyzed and incapacitated you. What you did with grief determines whether you are healing and adjusting to your loss and the pain, or not. Perhaps you are like the lady had lost her son ten years before. She said that at the time of her son’s death she couldn’t get the sad to come out, and later, when she was ready to grieve and needed people to listen and help her, they thought she should be over her grief. She needed to do the grief work of mourning to deal with her pain. And she found out that it is never too late to do that.

I believe that mourning is a necessary part in the process of adapting to your losses while learning to figure out your new life. You might choose not to do it, or you could have gotten stuck in your grief in a way that keeps you from moving forward. Are there things you won’t talk about or think about? Do you find yourself trying to protect your heart from further pain or loss? Does your pain seem to prevent you from enjoying and trusting what you now have or the joys of where life and relationships could take you?

At the beginning of our grief we are made to feel numb and unable to let the reality of the death and its consequences sink into our lives. Later, when we able to feel again and to do the work of grieving, it is our choice whether we are willing to feel and deal with the pain, or not. If you don’t mourn when you feel sadness, then I believe you will likely miss out on being able to fully embrace life and the potential it holds for you. I think that those who could have been comforted by you, as you shared what brought you comfort, will miss out. I am afraid that some of you who don’t deal with your pain will turn to addictions to try to cover and mask your pain.

Mourning is work each one does individually. People can and should come alongside you to support and help, but ultimately it is up to you to be willing to get on the outside what is on the inside.

May I encourage those of you who might refuse to talk about or deal with your pain that there is a better way. If you believe it won’t help to express your pain, I challenge you to try it. If you think you have healed and no longer are bothered by your grief, I encourage you to try to talk about your loved one and the losses that have occurred in your life. And let me know how that goes, if you will. This is a big subject, one I think might be good to revisit after I hear from some of you.

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