Good Grief! When Does It End?

To grieve, or not to grieve.

I’m not sure we have a choice. It either happens or it doesn’t.

Trouble is, I’ve experienced so many rounds of loss in the last few years that I can no longer discern whether I’m in or out of grief mode. So I picked up one of the latest books on the subject by Ron Marasco and Brian Shuff—About Grief: Insights, Setbacks, Grace Notes, Taboos.

Years ago when I knew I was suffering from grief and needed to read about it, there was hardly a book to be found on the topic. Now it’s a genre with its own section head in bookstores and libraries. You can find books categorized according to the age of the deceased, your relationship to the deceased, the way the deceased left this world (murder, suicide, accident, illness), and the species of the deceased. You can find various approaches to understanding grief—through a lens of psychology, neurology, spirituality, or, as is the case with About Grief, through the tad flippant view of a literature/film buff.

One passage that gave me pause was this excerpt from C. S. Lewis’s A Grief Observed:

I once read the sentence, “I lay awake all night with a toothache, thinking about toothaches and lying awake.” That’s true to life. Part of every misery is, so to speak, the misery’s shadow or reflection: the fact that you don’t merely suffer but have to keep on thinking about the fact that you suffer. I not only live each day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.

I started pondering how often I pondered my grief. I wanted to know how normal I was. I also wanted to be like C. S. Lewis. But the truth is I’m neither.

Grief and I have been together so long that I don’t have to think about it anymore—it’s permeated me. Clings to my body, oozes into my marrow, reminds me of its presence through tensions and pain and overall blueness.

Case in point: Every November, no matter what’s going right for me, I wear a whiff of melancholy. And every November, I’m perplexed by this fragrance until I remember—once again—that this was the season of great loss for my family: a grandfather and a sister within a two-week period.

My brain no longer tallies the dead; the numbers entwine with my physical well-being.

So the real choice seems to be, To grieve mindfully, or to grieve without awareness.

The right decision may be obvious, but it’s not easy.

[Thinking About Death by Frida Kahlo.]