Healing Does Not Mean Forgetting

I was reading a book about glaciers to my kids recently. We learned that if a glacier encounters an obstacle it can’t simply plow over, it will slowly melt around it and refreeze on the other side. But, it doesn’t come back together. Instead, a deep crack in the glacier forms called a crevasse. This is how grief can feel when we encounter the obstacle of great loss. Once whole and moving forward with life’s momentum, we now feel split apart and deeply broken.

But how do we heal it? How do we get to that “acceptance stage” people talk about, and do we want to? How are we supposed to heal when healing feels like a betrayal of the person we loved and lost?

It is too much to expect healing to happen right away. Numbness, sadness, depression, loneliness, anger, longing, and guilt are all normal feelings when we lose someone we love. And while grief can look different for everyone, we cannot skip feelings. Despite the fact that these emotions are normal, they feel anything but normal to us. After numbness and shock, the waves of emotions are uncomfortable and intense; they can cause our whole bodies to ache. And, they are natural, even necessary. 

We may judge ourselves as being flawed, and feel as though there is something wrong with us. This is especially true if it seems as if we should be on a specific timeline for “getting over it.” Well intended friends may attempt to make us feel better or try to fix it somehow. We must be fundamentally broken or have some kind of diagnosable disorder.

Author and therapist Francis Wellner wrote, “Grief is not a problem to be solved, but an experience to be witnessed.”

In acute grief you may realize your current reality is vastly different from many others you encounter. It can feel as if you are excluded from normal life. Your world is different; you are different. This can come with the feeling of isolation. It may seem as if you are the only one who feels the way you do. And the reality is, we cannot heal in isolation.

According to grief expert David Kessler, the number one need of the grieving is that our pain be witnessed. We need connection with others who understand and are living with the experience of grief.  It is when our pain is witnessed and we feel truly seen and understood by others, that we realize our feelings make sense. We can begin to take away the judgment we may have regarding our own feelings.

With the courage we get from knowing we are not alone, we are able to experience our feelings more fully. We may even begin to recognize that these feelings are not final. They are always changing. They will swell up when we least expect it. And, if we stay with them, we notice the swell doesn’t last and we have, in fact, survived it. We can survive the next swell of feelings as well.

Healing does not mean forgetting. Profound grief comes from the experience of profound love. Although our loved one is gone, this does not mean we ever stop loving them. With healing, the pain of grief will lessen. The love never will.