To my beautiful friends!
I just felt somewhat called to write about the notion of grief and how I feel like I can best navigate it, and hopefully inspire you to do the same in your life ❤️🙏🏻
The truth is, grief isn’t a “one-size-fits-all” kind of process. Everybody is going to respond and react differently when it comes to grieving. It doesn’t follow any neat, linear pattern, or correlate with any defined set of factors or variables. No, grief is not simple. Dealing with it is a diverse, multifaceted, nuanced process; the responses to which we can neither accurately predict nor measure. In many ways, we must learn to “surf” the waves it comes in.
While I have faced a bereavement in my family in times of late (as many of you know), I don’t think grief is necessarily confined to death itself. I think it can be the loss of anything or anyone that you once loved, or at the very least invested emotion into. With COVID-19, I lost my college life, my plans to do volunteer work, make a difference in a number of communities around the world, and in some ways, I might have even lost my self esteem too.
But let us consider an analogy that a very wise friend once told me; that life and grief are like bubbles of sorts. The truth is, that, at first, the grief bubble appears to nearly entirely occupy the entire volume of your life bubble. This may become so intense that you can no longer focus on anything else in your life. Other than the grief, there appears to be nothing. But, as life goes on, maybe it’s not that the bubble of grief gets smaller, maybe it’s that the bubble of life triumphs over it, expanding around it at a prodigious rate And, eventually, you can reach an acceptance of this new lifestyle, realizing that your life will go on to have meaning, value and beauty again, albeit in different ways to before.
Acceptance does not mean that you are necessarily on fire with ecstatic energy or elation, it just means that you’ve come to a place where you can accept this new reality and what it means in your life going forward. In time you realize that to hand over your full, beautiful blessing of a life to grief, would ultimately be the greater tragedy.
Also, what I find helps with grief, is finding an outlet to express your humanity. Dr Edith Eger, clinical psychologist and Auschwitz survivor, reinforces this idea with her quote “The opposite of depression is expression.” So if at all possible, find some kind of platform to express your humanity. It works wonders at a time of painful loss or tragedy.
On one final note, maybe we should not try to change the way the world or our circumstances look; maybe we need to try to change the way we see them.
Rooting for you with all my heart ❤️
-Ellen
Christ in the City Summer of service 2019 