Grief is a terrible thing. When you lose someone you love, your heart is broken, you feel lost, you feel disconnected from the rest of the world and you, at times, feel hopeless.
You may experience a range of raw, hurting emotions. Shock, anger, disbelief, guilt, and profound sadness are all normal emotions during the grief process.
Your physical health can also be affected. Loss of sleep, eating too little, eating too much, not eating at all, not being able to think coherently are physical factors which co-exist with the emotional factors.
There’s is no right or wrong way to grieve. We are all very different and we deal with grief very differently. How you go through grieving depend on many things, including how you cope, your faith, the significance of the loss, your life experiences and other things.
What we have to keep in mind is that grieving is a process. For some, it is a shorter process than for others. But it does take time. There is no way to force your way through the grief process–you can’t hurry it up. There is no time-table that you should follow to get through the different steps of grieving. Some people start to feel better in weeks or months, but others grieve for years.
The important thing to keep in mind is that you must be patient with yourself. You have to let the grief process naturally happen. That’s the only way you can begin to feel better.
One of our followers emailed me the other day. She was talking about the loss of her husband. She told me how some days she was perfectly happy, that she would laugh a lot with her grandchildren and be able to function normally. She called days like these her “sunshine days”. But she also said, “There are some days, I think I smell that clean soap smell he always had or I see something in the barn–a saddle, one of the horses I know he would have loved, or I think I hear him call my name.” She called those days her “dark days”.
As I was reading the email, I thought he must have been gone only a short while, so I asked how long ago she had lost her beloved. She said, “Twenty-six years”. I just thought to myself, ‘Wow, that’s a long time to grieve’.
Give yourself time. Be patient with yourself. And pray. When you need to cry, cry. When you need to scream, scream. And never let anyone tell you that there is a time-frame for grief.
Sending you prayerful blessings of love and gratitude from Sterrett, Alabama!
Charity M. Richey-Bentley
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