In a very general way, our grief journeys include three very loosely defined places. These are not “stages of grief” that we have to go through in specific ways and times.

The first place is an early grief time when grief is mostly in control and we mostly have to hang on and ride through it, often in a fog, as best we can. Gradually, with time and as we work on it, we begin to find some healing and start the reconstruction of our lives as we learn to navigate our grief with some purpose. This second place that we can perhaps call reconstruction, usually makes up the largest part of our journeys. At some point, as we learn to accept all of what has happened in our lives, a third place evolves as healing slowly becomes wellness and we begin to actively choose to live the next part of our lives.

Definitions:

Hope:A feeling of expectation and desire for a certain thing to happen. Grounds for believing that something good may happen. To want something to happen or be the case.

Healing:The process of becoming sound or healthy again. To alleviate a person’s distress or anguish. To correct or put right an undesirable situation. To restore a person to spiritual wellness.

Healing implies an active, ongoing process, a change through time where an unwell aspect of our lives moves toward wellness, perhaps with our active participation. 

Healed implies a completion of the process, a destination we can reach. A place where we can say we’re OK now. We’re done!

Wellness:The state of being in good health, physically, mentally or spiritually, especially as an actively pursued goal.

During our grief journeys, we will probably experience all of these things in some way, although it will be different for each of us. They will somehow be part of how we move forward through our journey and our grief. They may occur separately or together and they can often overlap as one or another of them becomes more dominant along our paths. In this way, there is a kind of continuum from grief through healing to wellness.

When we’re ready, healing is something we can work on as we move forward in our journeys and in our lives. It’s also probably best if we don’t just wait it out, we are probably better served by being willing to give healing our active attention!

An important thing to also be aware of, is that our grief journeys contain change. To create healing and wellness, we will probably have tolearnto accept the changes that have happened in our lives and we will probably have to learn to let ourselves change as well. Within that change, we can begin to build healing and wellness and as we build healing and wellness, we  are also changing! 

Impatience and some “Zen of Grief”:

If what we do in our grief is concentrate on the destination, on being healed and being done with our grief, instead of concentrating on the journey and the healing and what the journey contains and what it may teach us, we may also become impatient to get there. If we focus on the end of the road instead of what’s on the road along the way, we may just want to reach that end, reach the top of the mountain so to speak, perhaps just because it is the top or the peak or the goal. 

Perhaps we seek the mountain top because we feel that if we get there, it might also be the end of the many difficult and often painful things we are experiencing along the way. We may just want to get there as quickly as possible and be done! Or, perhaps that’s just how we are and goal seeking is our nature. 

I’ve had people tell me, especially fairly early in their journey, that they were in a hurry to get through their grief and “get over it”. They were tired of the pain and the inability to function as they might want to and they wanted to get through it, be done with it and leave it behind them as quickly as they could. They really didn’t like the scary idea that they might have to grieve for years! (Remember the first time you heard someone at a support meeting say they were 3-4 years into their journey).

Later on in our journeys, when it has been “years” perhaps, impatience to reach an end of the journey can overtake us again as well.

In many ways, that’s not surprising. Grief is usually such a long and difficult process  and is often so painful and debilitating, that the longer it goes on, most people will want to have it stop hurting as soon as possible and to have it be over sooner than later.

Grief is a journey, not a destination:

So, it seems to me that the things we encounter and experience throughout our grief journey aren’t a destination in themselves, they are just part of a movement towards a different part of our lives. We may or may not ever reach that end place, we may or may not ever be healed, but we may learn, we may grow, we may reach a new equilibrium and find a peaceful place to live within ourselves where we may find wellness. 

Do we ever fully heal? That’s a “TBD”, we have to first take the journey to find out. And I wonder, does it even really matter if we do become healed or is it what we learn on the journey that’s important in what the next part of our lives look like?

So, how long does it take?

It takes as long as it takes! As we’ve talked about before, there is no timetable or calendar to grief. Grief and healing progress at their own pace, differently for each of us.

The one thing that may be a constant is that our grief does indeed change with time and our grieving changes us through time. Usually, especially if we face it and work at it, our grief becomes less severe, we learn and grow and move forward through it, each in our own way and at our own pace towards healing and wellness.

But grief is a journey, we talk about our grief journeys all the time! By taking that journey as it comes, we can find ourselves learning to be and accept just where we are at each moment along the way and we can find healing in each moment as it comes to us as well.

So, from that perspective, what is healing, what does it look like in our grief journeys?  

What are we trying to accomplish? 

As I’ve seen it, as time goes by we start to live more in the present and dwell less on the past. As we come to accept the changes in our lives, we also come to allow life to take over. We also allow grief to recede as we become more and more comfortable with how we are creating new ways to live and with new ways we are finding to do things as we build the next part of our lives.

We also become able to hold the memories of our lives with our loved ones in a place that becomes less painful as time goes by. We can come to find a place that honors them and the love and lives we shared with them, a place where we recognize that who we are now will always contain what we learned and shared with our loved ones. And in that way, they will always be a part of us.

I think healing and wellness ultimately includes finding an equilibrium between our past lives with our loved ones and the next part of our lives without them. 

Questions:

• Do you think that actively working on finding healing and/or wellness would help to accelerate or smooth the process? How might it do that?

• What do you hope for in your bereavement? Do you feel that those hopes are realistic?

• How can you use your hope to help you heal?

• What do healing and wellness mean to you in the sense of your grief?

• What would you like to learn or experience that would make you feel like you were healing?

• Looking back to the beginning of your journey, do you think you are healing?

• Can you imagine wellness and if so, what does it, (will it) look like to you?

• Are you impatient with or within your grief journey?

• What parts of your grief make you the most impatient if any?

• What do you think is the best way to deal with impatience?

• Others ?