There is a lot I can say about grief–its unpredictability and duration and non-linear quality. That while death is a certainty for everyone, it is also one of the most awe-inspiring and bizarre realities of our time on this planet–that someone who is so loved, who has made such impact, that was sitting a moment ago, can be gone. Poof. Our brains aren’t really equipped to process the impermanence, the ephemeral nature of our person-hood and so we are cast adrift into the sea of bereavement.
In the therapeutic sense, I sometimes think of grief like a wild sea. And someone is in it, floating, head barely above water. I drift up to them in a life raft and pull them in. But I don’t have oars. We float together, me using whatever I can to direct us, until we find someplace more manageable. Somewhere less tumultuous and unpredictable. There is no magic in grief work, there is only truth and pain and presence and witnessing. I don’t believe that the best grief therapist in the world can make the pain go away, but I do believe they can make it feel less terrifying. They can help us find some solid ground, even briefly, that reminds us of this life and what else we can connect to that has meaning and reminds us of who we are.
I think of grief as I do sea glass. Our hearts and spirits begin as a bottle or vessel of some kind–solid…functional. But when we lose someone we love, the glass is broken. We have all encountered broken glass. Most of us have encountered brokenness. Sometimes it fits neatly with its other pieces, but just as often, it has holes and places that don’t fit together anymore. The pieces are jagged. They are potentially dangerous. The brokenness also can be isolating. When we feel broken, we don’t want to or know how to engage with others in the same way that we did before. We are sharp edges, we too are encountering the sharpness.
The thing is, that if broken glass finds it’s way to the ocean, it tumbles in the surf. It rolls in the sand. The broken, sometimes deadly sharp edges begin to soften and erode over time, first rounding slightly and then softening into a lovely, rounded piece of glass that feels good in the hand. It maintains its weight, it maintains its color, but it loses all of the pointy, jagged edges that cut and hurt and wound. The glass doesn’t disappear, but the sense that it is merely a broken, dangerous thing does. Sea glass, while derivative of all sharpness and edges, becomes its own object.
To walk on the shore and find a good piece of sea glass is a wonder. The colors are muted and beautiful, and the texture and light that it holds feel like a bit of magic…a lucky talisman tossed at our feet from the sea.
Grief is heavy and sharp and hard and painful. It is overwhelming and almost devastatingly complete in its ability to alter how the world looks and feels and tastes and moves. It eases for a second, only to sideswipe you in the next. Like our sea glass, it feels like the world is covered in its jaggedness until the sea washes over and over and over, softening edges, eroding the painful corners. The erosion of the edges, the softening of the pain does not happen overnight. It is a process to convert brokenness to something less threatening.
Though I have been asked hopefully many times, “Won’t I just feel better with time?”. I believe that it is work and love and self-awareness and self-compassion and also of course, time that soften the edges of grief. A broken piece of glass, without the tossing of the ocean, the roughness of the sand, the hitting against the rocks, will never become sea glass. A broken piece of glass left on your kitchen table in one year will be…a broken piece of glass. The sometimes painful process is responsible for the conversion to something that has its own meaning and place and beauty. Grief may never totally subside. We may never stop hurting on some level, missing the people we have lost, wishing they were still here. But we can hold our sea glass, with its weight and light and history, and we can have a sense of where we came from and how we got to this less dangerous, less jagged place.