The word bereavement means ‘to be torn apart.’ Grieving is the difficult, painful, and necessary journey of learning to live after significant loss. By consciously engaging with your emotions, you can find a way forward. You become stronger and more resilient. These are qualities that help you in your next chapter of life. So, each time you move through waves of emotional intensity, remind yourself: I just healed a little bit more.
You have to feel grief to heal it. Yet the pain can be so intense, you want to get it over with fast. But there’s no quick way through grief. Instead, you have to gradually build your tolerance to it. That way, you can do the work of adapting to loss. That’s where grief dosing comes in.
Jimmy Buffett died over Labor Day weekend. There’s been an outpouring for grief as America mourns our Poet of Paradise. Yet it’s perplexing that we grieve so hard for people we’ve never met. Who don’t even know we exist. Grief experts call it parasocial grief and say it’s real. Once you understand how we form attachments to other people, our grief for our favorite stars makes complete sense.
Worrying over your own reaction to a loved one’s death is a major source of suffering in bereavement. Compassionate self-talk eases your mind so you can focus on soothing self-care.
Grief over a pet’s death is real. And it’s really hard. That’s because the amount of grief we feel is correlated with the degree of attachment we have to our loved one. Our relationship with companion animals is set up to create a powerful bond. This post describes how to move through the pain of losing a pet.
You may think this is a story I simply made up to ease my memory of a painful experience. I won’t argue the facts over whether or not humans have control over their exact time of death. But I will quibble about the word “simply.” Because there’s nothing simple about the human capacity to weave stories from the events of their lives. Storytelling is one of our most brilliant survival skills.