Every 12.8 seconds someone completes suicide. Every year, more than 600,000 kids experience foster care. And, 1 in 20 children will experience the death of a parent or sibling before age 18 (this may be higher). Add on the statistics for the death of spouse or child, divorce, miscarriage, loss of a pet, all the intangible losses (loss of trust, for example), and all of the more than 40 losses – I’d say grief is a pretty big deal. Agree? Also, the economic cost is over $75 billion annually, too. And moreover, the medical costs associated with grief as well.
Grief costs us all. Aside from the obvious costs, we also lose time; of being able to be present in our lives. Especially in the early days of grief, where the days run together and life around moves on but you feel like you’re stuck in some parallel universe, watching life all around you sail by.
We are robbed of so much when we’re feeling lost in our feelings and resist giving them a voice. The feelings seem to have nowhere to go or we don’t know what to do with them all when they rush in. So to cope, we stuff them down and bury them or turn to things to occupy our time and minds (alcohol, drugs, sex, shopping, exercise, workaholism, etc.). Unless we’re blessed to have a heart with ears (listening ear) that doesn’t attempt to fix and hold space for us, then we isolate. And, I think eventually cut ourselves off from others regardless, because we have this notion that others get sick of hearing the story, right? Get on with it! Get over it! It’s been 2 years, you should be over it by now. Even if no one ever speaks these words, you feel them. I know these words well. Thirty years – you’d think I’d be over it by now, too. And there it is – a myth about grief that time heals all wounds. Time does nothing but pass, friends. Time doesn’t heal squat. It’s the action you take within time that makes the difference – nothing else.
You know what grief has cost you. I don’t need to tell you. You feel it and know it well within your heart; you just haven’t articulated it out loud. Because acknowledging out loud what grief has cost you will mean you’re in the position of awareness. You then have a choice to make – ignore it and go on with your buried grief feelings or the hard choice – face those feelings head-on.
Only you know when the time is right for you to move beyond your grief. Just make sure you’re not holding on to what is familiar out of fear.
“…As a seed buried in the earth cannot imagine itself as an orchid or hyacinth, neither can a heart packed with hurt imagine itself loved or at peace. The courage of the seed is that once cracked; it cracks all the way.” – Mark Nepo, The Book of Awakening
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