As I was watching The Golden Bachelorette, I witnessed some of the real, raw, and hard conversations and feelings that surround grief. While the lead of the show shares her experience with grief openly, the men also share their grief with each other. Grief is an aspect of life that touches everyone at some point. One of the moments that stood out to me about how grief can show up was in episode 3 when Charles Ling was sharing questions about his wife’s death that had been weighing on him for six years. A lot of his questions were “how,” “why,” “why my wife” that remain unanswered, but he also had a specific question about her death that he never got an answer for. He felt comfortable in that space to ask one of the other men, who is a doctor, about what happened and was able to find peace and relief in the answer.
Sharing your story and holding space for the memory of a person you lost, while still getting to laugh and have fun and build new connections, shows how healing it can be to have a community and people to ask questions to and express your emotions too. Grief is a natural response to loss. It encompasses a range of emotions that can include sadness, anger, guilt, confusion, and sometimes relief - grief is multifaceted. It is a universal experience, yet unique to every person.
Why is it that everyone experiences grief but it is so hard to talk about? Though grief is an emotional experience that comes with being human, our society often struggles with knowing how to talk about grief. Watching someone you care about hurt so deeply is hard, and your immediate response is to want to help relieve some of the heartbreak. But what should you even say? As we support our loved ones experiencing loss, we can sometimes feel at a loss for words. Often, we try to lessen the pain by focusing on the positive. However, our goal of instilling hope and expressing compassion can miss the mark and result in your grieving friend or family member feeling unseen or misunderstood. They may feel like their hurt is invalid or too much and pull away from sharing it with others. Sometimes, people find comfort in looking for a silver lining, but grief is also allowed to just suck. We want to make sense of something that doesn’t make sense at all.
Grief is not something to get over or overcome. It is not some test that you can pass or an achievement that you get a gold star for completing. Experiencing the magnitude of the loss of a loved one is a lifelong journey and something we learn to incorporate into our lives rather than overcome. There is no timeline or stages you have to follow to process grief. There is no finish line you have to cross in order to have worked through it. It can be honored and held at all times. There can be space for love and joy and heartbreak and sadness.
Grief still exists no matter how much time has passed, no matter how much joy you have in your life, no matter who you are surrounded by. And that is okay. It is okay for years to pass, to be happy, to be surrounded by incredible people and still feel the magnitude of the loss you experienced. It is also okay to still have immense love for the person you lost and open yourself to new love. Joy and grief can exist in the same space, and they don’t have to be taken away from the other. Navigating the guilt that can arise after a loss, finding room in your life for joy and happiness, still holding space for the person you lost can be confusing, overwhelming, and vastly misunderstood. There is no right way to navigate grief, but listening to the conversations on The Golden Bachelorette, I loved how they emphasized the importance of getting to tell your story and how it can be healing to have your grief be witnessed.
While there is nothing that can take the pain away, it can help to have someone witness it and not push it away. Therapy is a space where your grief can be witnessed. In therapy, there is no pressure to overcome grief, there is no wrong time to talk about it, and there are no expectations. This is a safe place to honor and hold for you to process it. This is a space where you don’t have to talk about it if you’re not wanting to or where you can dive deep into it if it’s all you want to talk about. As you process your emotions, know that it’s okay to seek help, share your story, and embrace both the pain and the love that accompany loss.
In the wise words of Charles Ling from The Golden Bachelorette, “it is necessary to share your suffering, your sadness.”
-Avery
(Learn more about Avery here)
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