Grief Day by Day: Simple, Everyday Practices to Help Yourself Survive… and Thrive

By Alan D. Wolfelt

When we are grieving the death of someone loved, we may struggle with making it through each day. How are we supposed to cope with our gut-wrenching grief and live our daily lives at the same time? What should we do with our chaotic, painful, and intrusive thoughts and feelings? How do we survive? And is it possible to both grieve and live with meaning and hope? If you've been asking yourself such questions, this book by one of the world's most beloved grief counselors provides affirmation and answers. Rituals give us something to do with our grief. Simple, everyday practices can give structure to our grief and hold us up us when we're feeling like we might collapse. In fact, when we're in grief, rituals are essentially effective beelines to healing. Learn what makes a ritual a ritual. (Spoiler alert: Rituals can be easy and fast!) Try some of the many solo rituals gathered here, such as letter writing, meditating, intentional emoting, grief walks, and the 10-minute grief encounter. And reach out to friends and loved ones who might like to get together for one of the simple group ceremonies. By incorporating the healing power of ritual into your days, you'll be not only surviving your grief, you'll be building in meaning and hope so that you can go on to thrive.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Independent Publishers Group
• Release date: Oct 1, 2018
• ISBN: 9781617222702

Book preview

Word

Introduction

Welcome to Grief Day by Day.

While I want to welcome you, I also understand that you are hurting. I know you would rather not be in grief. Yet I’m glad you’re here—because even in your time of darkness, I have hopeful news and helpful ideas to share.

I’ve been a grief counselor for a long time now—more than forty years, in fact—and I’ve written a number of what I hope are compassionate books on healing in grief. But in this little book, for the first time, I’ll be spotlighting a secret of sorts. It’s a revelation that will help you feel better right now—as well as live better in the months and years to come.

But before I unveil the secret, let’s review a few important foundational principles that will help prepare you for our discussion to come.

1. First, grief, which is our internal experience of loss, is normal and necessary. Grief is what we think and feel on the inside after someone we love dies or we lose something important to us. For the most part, grief happens automatically because it’s a form of love. Grief is love’s conjoined twin; we don’t get one without the other. And because love is what gives our lives meaning, we must also embrace and express our natural grief.

2. Second, mourning, which is the outward expression of our grief, is what helps our grief heal. When we talk about our thoughts and feelings—or journal them or paint them or cry them out or any number of other mourning activities and behaviors—we’re moving them from the inside to the outside, and in doing so, we’re giving them motion. Emotions in motion are able to flow with our ongoing lives. Emotions in motion help our grief start to soften and heal.

3. And third, our grief affects us not only emotionally but also physically, cognitively, socially, and spiritually. Our grief permeates all facets of our selves, so when we do our work of mourning, it’s essential that we find ways to mourn that give voice to all of these different parts of who we are. The spiritual realm is particularly important.

Grief as a journey

In my writings and presentations, I often talk about grief as a journey. It’s a difficult, painful trek, and one that has no timetable and no final destination, because grief never totally ends. Instead, as we mourn and give our grief motion, bit by bit, over time, we learn to accommodate it as part of who we are. We integrate it into our lives. When it is fully integrated, we find that we are reconciled to it. It is an inextricable, ever-present part of who we are, yet we also find that we are invested in continuing our lives forward with meaning and purpose.

In the wilderness of grief, most of us meander back and forth, around and around. We’re a bit lost, and we’re wandering. That’s a natural and fine way to go because grief, like love, is mysterious and not entirely understandable. It’s also recursive. That means it loops and doubles back on itself. We may find ourselves recovering the same ground, sometimes over and over and over again. Still, as long as we’re embracing and expressing our authentic, unique grief, we’re moving…and ever so slowly, we are healing.

Picture if you will the bird’s-eye view of the circuitous paths we often find ourselves on in grief. They look something like this:

But!

But what if instead of wandering aimlessly in the wilderness of our grief, we could move as the crow flies? What if there were a more direct, really effective, supercharged route to healing in grief?

I think there is.

1

The Secret

In all my many years as a grief counselor and educator, I have been privileged to companion thousands of grieving people. I consider this work both an honor and a calling. But despite my schooling and experience, I am not the expert. It is the grievers themselves who are the experts. After all, they are the only ones who can teach me what their unique grief is like for them. My main responsibilities are to listen, learn, and empathize—and, in my teaching and authoring roles, to share their lessons of hope and healing with others.

As I progressed in my career and understanding, the more love and grief stories I listened to and learned from, the more I became aware of some quiet patterns. These patterns are important because they can help grievers like you embrace your grief and find your way to reconciliation.

One of those patterns was something I’ve already mentioned: that mourning, or the outward expression of grief, helps people heal. I saw that those who were more open and authentic in their grief and mourning—in ways that suited their unique personalities and needs—were more likely to work their way to renewed meaning and purpose in their continuing lives.

Another pattern I noticed was the converse of open, authentic mourning: a lot of people carry their grief instead of mourning it.

We humans have the capacity to keep our thoughts and feelings inside of us, and pretend, on the outside, that nothing is amiss. (Some people even have the capacity to barely acknowledge their own grief inside themselves.) If we grieve but never mourn after a significant loss, we end up carrying our grief, often for years and decades. And carried, or unacknowledged, grief creates insidious symptoms, such as ongoing anxiety, depression, and problems with intimacy. I call it living in the shadows of the ghosts of grief because it causes people to die inside while they are still alive.

And the third and perhaps most mysterious pattern that emerged as I learned from grievers is that while it takes both active mourning and time to heal—and there is and should be no timetable in grief—some people did seem to authentically reconcile their grief more expediently, even people who had suffered profound and traumatic losses.

For years I bore witness to these remarkable grievers’ stories, and slowly I discerned that many of them had something in common. They acknowledged and expressed their grief—yes. They actively remembered the person who died—yes. They developed new self-identities apart from the person who died—yes. They searched for spiritual meaning—yes. They often had good support from friends and family—yes. In short, they actively worked on the six needs of mourning that we will soon discuss.

But there was also something else—something unassuming and rather simple—that seemed to lift them up and carry them on a current of hope. What was it?

Often unknowingly, these grievers had leveraged the power of ritual to supercharge their healing.

What is ritual?

First of all, what do I mean by ritual? Does the word have you picturing a weird, cultish rite around a bonfire in the middle of a forest in the middle of the night? Or does it conjure images of rote, by-the-book religious ceremonies?

Don’t worry—those concepts of ritual are not what I mean.

Wikipedia defines ritual this way: a sequence of activities involving gestures, words, and objects, performed in a sequestered place, and performed according to a set sequence. That definition is a bit too prescriptive for our use, but it’s getting closer to what we want.

In contemporary parlance, we often use the word ritual in the context of self-care routines. We have our morning coffee-and-news ritual. We have daily grooming rituals. We have getting-ready-for-bed rituals. We have exercise and relaxation rituals. That routine you have of taking off your shoes after a long day and curling up in your favorite chair with your beverage of choice and your companion animal? That’s a ritual.

We also have rituals for luck, such as crossing our fingers, and