GRIEF - the Loneliest Journey

Remember how Benjamin Franklin once said that nothing in this world was certain but death and taxes?
Well, I beg to differ. Or at least add one other thing - grief.
It's inevitable. In life, we experience many things - good days, bad days, love, joy, health, sickness... and the list goes on and on. And we all experience these things in different ways. Grief, that looming, inevitable feeling of absolute loss, is another life experience that we all share - but in absolutely different ways.

Grief is very personal. While all of the professionals tell us that we all experience "the stages of grief" -  (Denial, Anger, Bargaining, Depression, and Acceptance) -  we all experience them in our own, unique way. A very personal way. No two people experience it in exactly the same manner. That's why I call it the loneliest journey. We can support each other, share our feelings of loss and pain, and help each other all that we can. But it's still a private journey for each of us. Very private. A shared road that each walks alone.

I'm not just talking about death, here. While that is an obvious cause of grieving, there are others. We grieve when our hearts are broken for any reason - a broken relationship; an unfinished pregnancy; a baby born with a disability; when we find out we can never have a child; when someone we love chooses a destructive path; when we get a devastating diagnosis for either ourselves or a loved one - the list goes on. We grieve for strangers when we learn of their devastation in a natural disaster or a horrific accident. We grieve.
ALL of us have a personal relationship with grief.

For something that we all share in common, it's certainly something that we don't talk about very much. It's hard to talk about. It's awkward. It's acknowledging that we are infinitely vulnerable, and it's baring our souls to others. We do not enjoy any of that. Imagine walking up to someone and saying "I'm fragile. I'm mortal. I'm vulnerable."  Yeah... not your everyday conversation, is it?
But it should be!
Because it's part of us, and it's ever so real.
In our society today, it's almost taboo to say, "I'm hurting inside, and don't know how to make it stop."

I vividly remember when my Daddy died, when I was eighteen. The days leading up to his funeral were filled with a thousand things to do. We grieved, off and on, but there was just so much to DO! Once the funeral was over, we were all pretty numb from all of the emotions we had felt throughout the day. Funerals are exhausting. We just seemed to want to sit and not think about anything in particular. Just... exist.
The next morning, when the sun came up, and the day began just as if nothing in the world had changed, I remember feeling like it was profane. How dare the world just keep turning? How dare people just get on with a normal day? How dare life keep on going, when there was such a horrendous tear in the fabric of ours?

But it did; and it does. And I hate it; and I love it.
I hate it, because it doesn't seem fair that the world doesn't stop turning in honor of the passing of a human being. It seems so disrespectful, somehow. Yet, I love it, because without that rhythm of life continuing, we'd never be able to grasp onto it and hold on for dear life while working through our grief. Oh, what a paradox!

My best friend's husband died suddenly two weeks ago. Just went to sleep, and didn't wake up in our world again. Just like that. He came home from work, ate dinner, had a beer, went to bed, just like any other night, and then just stopped being here. How does that happen? How do we wrap our minds around that?
Faith helps. Believing or knowing that we are eternal beings helps. But only a little. Let's face it - it doesn't help us understand how one minute we're here, and the next, we're not. That the transition from this life to the next is so sudden, so final, so blink-of-an-eye, that we simply can't understand how that happens.
Yet, it does.

Those who are left to deal with that awful, devastating, yet natural blow dealt to us somehow muddle through making the right arrangements, supporting each other the best we can, and sharing our love and sorrow. But, then what? How do we share our grief? In a way, we can't. I grieved for my father as his child. My mother grieved for him as his wife. My brothers and sisters grieved for their father - not mine. Because each personal relationship is different. His friends grieved for their friend - not their collective friend; each individual grieved in a different way. His mom? Well, the grief of a parent for a child who precedes them in death has to be the worst grief there is.

So, as I sit here with no answers to my real question - how can I help my friend grieve? - I'm sad. I'm lost. I'm angry that I can't diminish her pain in the slightest. I'm frustrated that all I have are words and tears. And I'm really upset that we, as a society, pretend that grieving isn't a lifelong process. That, somehow, a Magic Day will come when the grieving stops.
It. Will. Not.

But LIFE... life WILL go on. Right along with the various stages (and repeated stages) of grief. The lyrics of the Avenged Sevenfold song "Acid Rain" seem to me to illustrate it perfectly.
"Life wouldn't be so precious, dear, if there never was an end.
... Children still play in the garden,
Dance as the sun slips away.
Not even stars last forever.
Cleanse us, Acid Rain."

Tears can be acidic or alkaline. Tears of sadness, or grief, are acidic. Did M. Shadows know this when he wrote this song? I'll leave it to you, Reader, to guess.

My good friend Bernie once told me, "Love is forever, or it was never really love." Truer words were never spoken. And when you have forever feelings for someone, your grief will never end. It will transform, and it will eventually become less and less the central focus of your life, but it will be there, hiding in the corner, just waiting for an opportunity to remind you that you are still infinitely vulnerable and inevitably changed forever.

I still miss my parents. I still miss my brother. I still miss my friends. I still grieve over the loss of the son we thought we would have, despite loving the son that we do have. I still want to make it possible for other people to never go through this. But it's not to be.

We grieve, and while we grieve, each of us walking the same road together - yet alone, isolated by our personal grief - we endure one of life's greatest mysteries and learn one of life's greatest lessons - alone. If you're going to live, you're going to love. If you're going to love, you're eventually going to hurt more than you ever thought possible.

But... even with all of that, I wouldn't exchange never loving for never grieving.

As the Garth Brooks song goes, " I could have missed the pain. But I'd have had to miss the dance."
And life is for dancing.