The Art of Grieving

I think of myself as one of the most upbeat positive people in the world. I have dedicated my adult life to bringing positive energy to those who need a boast. But there is a limit to everything. It seems that for the last few months I have done nothing but sit at the bedside of dying friends and attend funerals. Six of my friends are newly widowed and several more have husbands that are critically ill. Between my husband and I us we have lost literally dozens of friends and family members in the past three years, only two were from Covid.  

I thought I was handling these losses very pragmatically. I think of myself as having cultivated a higher perspective about life and death. I remind people often that we are spiritual beings having a human experience. Our bodies are only provisional vehicles for our life journey.  So why in the face of so many people I know shedding their temporary dwellings am I barely functioning? For instance: my “To Do List” has had the same growing number of items on it for the past few months. I owe dozens of people phone calls and emails and I haven’t written a blog in two months. I told myself had not written my blog because I did not have anything positive to share. In all honesty that that is not it at all. I finally realized I am grieving the loss of so many friends and family members and realizing the depth of the holes they have left in my life has left me with a deep malaise.  

The irony is that the holistic the work I do is often about helping people through grief and trauma, but I did not recognize my own grief. On some level I think I thought I could just ride above the muck on my lofty spiritual high horse, but of course I need to go through the manure just like everyone else. My rational minds knows that when one reaches a “certain age” you begin to lose friends, but no one warned me it would be at such a rapid pace. Once I slowed my spiritual steed down to a trot, I realized that I am not only sad for my friend’s losses, but I am deep down sad for my own losses. I had become paralyzed by a slow. accumulating grief, bringing me down off my high horse into the muck.

There are expert opinions on grief going back decades and a lot of new grief experts arriving on the scene in the wake of Covid. They all attempt to organize grief into neat little packages that we can wrap our arms and emotions around and they can be very useful. They give us structure that can eventually lead to acceptance and even joy. But most of them are quick to admit after years of research and in many cases their own experience of grieving… everyone’s grieving process is unique. Yes, there are general stages such as: Shock, Anger, Guilt, Sadness/Depression, and Acceptance.  You may or may not experience each stage in the order presented and the time frames are vastly different for everyone.

Witnessing the individual journeys of each of my widowed friends I feel like I have a front row seat on the grieving process these days. One friend was back out in the community helping others within a few weeks of her husband passing. Another friend has been so incapacitated she had to shut down her business. Yet, another has thrown herself into a brand-new business, burying herself in work. I have also seen everything in-between.

The important thing is to identify what stage you are in at any given time, and that can even be different from day to day and allow yourself to do whatever you need to do in that moment to be present for the accompanying emotions. This can be a tall order especially when you are in a crippling depression. Unfortunately, this is where many people get stuck especially if they have not allowed the time and space for some of the other stages such as the anger and deep sadness. There is not any way around these stages but through them.  

Anyone interested in The Journey into Self-Healing needs to learn the Art of Grieving. We are all grieving, or we will need to grieve someone or something at some time. The toughest of course is the loss of a close family member: spouse, partner, child, mother, father, sibling or best friend. Other grief might be over a divorce, a job or career loss, the death of a family pet, or change of lifestyle. Many of us are grieving the loss of our prior life before the pandemic, or previous to the effects of this tumultuous political environment. Grieving is not a science, it is an art. Everyone's process is unique but there are tools and techniques to ease the way.  That is why I have decided to offer a 10-Week series called The Healing Journey of Grief. Hopefully you will have the courage to join this 10-Week Session. 

Journey into Healing Grief    Begins Tuesday March 15Th

For more information visit: judymilinowski.com   click on Workshops at the bottom of the HOME page