grief

Sometimes I feel as though the heaviness of this world is too much. That I couldn't bear to open another newspaper, or watch another news cast. That evil and pain is so irrevocably rampant and evidence of God thin on the ground.

Just this week my friend has had another tragic miscarriage and another friend has died. Some weeks it seems as if the deaths, the miscarriages, the depressions, the broken dreams, will drag me beneath where I can breathe. I don't want this sadness. I don't want to grieve, to have to handle this suffocating emotion. I just want life again.

And sometimes when it gets too hard, maybe there are just one too many things that have gone wrong, or you're blind sighted by some tragedy, it feels as if you fight against it, but deep down where you won't even admit to, you wonder if it wouldn't just be easier to stop fighting, to let the sadness suffocate you, to just lie down and give in to it.
Just sometimes.

How do we grieve well? How do you move through grief, when just functioning takes all you've got? I fear that I mean by that, how do I just grieve so as to move as quickly as possible from that place. Is this cowardly? It feels placed somewhere in that vein. I feel at my weakest in this place.

Grief is an inescapable part of life, but a rhythm, a stage to pass in and out of, not to become mired in. Usually I just want out or I want to give up, I don't want to process, I don't want to examine and turn over this toxic emotion. I don't want to think, to feel.

I suspect to move on we must process, we must pick up our grief and interact with it somehow. We can't sleep through it, or busy it away, we still have to live, to put one foot in front of the other. The Israelites were given 30 days to mourn the death of someone, to wail, to give in to grief. There is a place for being overwhelmed and paralysed. After the 30 days they were to start life again. We must also face up to it, not give in.

In the face of the depths of grief some people will be facing, it feels incredibly feeble to offer this, but I have found a few threads that have helped me get through things before and process...

MUSIC
I remember reading with surprise on the jacket cover of the Dave Crowder Band 'B Collision' album about how they thought music and grief had a special relationship, how music can reach out and touch your grief in a way no other medium can (to paraphrase wildly). You may or may not agree. For me I find music bypasses my head and hits home with my emotions like nothing else. Not all music, and I can't necessarily connect a thread between music that does, from classical to rock, and I don't know why, but it does. I've been in places where I'm frozen, I haven't reacted, I haven't cried, but when I hit the right track somehow I'm balling my eyes out. Processing. Sometimes it helps that the artist has been in a similar place. Other times it is just enough to remind me of the things that are worth moving on for.

ART/CREATIVITY
Creating unleashes something in us akin to sparks of life. Whether it's painting or cooking or fixing a car, creativity can generate hope. Winston Churchill, who struggled with depression throughout his life, termed his 'black dog', found that art, painting, was the only thing that could fight this.

Try it, get out a canvas or drawing pad. You may just create something beautiful, or you might seek to express the darkness you're experiencing. It's not about the end product, it's about the process.

TALK
A more common strategy that never fails to surprise me how I fight it. It always seems to feel like the last thing I want to do. I don't want to make myself vulnerable in this place, I don't want to process. But, with the right person, someone you can trust, who will listen, it unfailingly helps. It helps remind you there are people who care, that there are people who have been through similar things, and survived, that there is life after grief.