By: Mariam Khan
Have you ever heard that grief itself is medicine? The grief you feel after losing someone will always help you heal. Too often, it is misunderstood that to move on in life, you need to move on from your grief. Rather than moving on from the feelings of loss, one should discover how to move forward with it.
It is difficult to find solid ground after you suffer major trauma, betrayal or lose someone you loved. It is heartening when your relationship breaks. It is devastating when your partner or anyone whom you loved dies or betrays. After you experience the terrible feelings of loss and betrayal, it is hard to even imagine that you will be able to pick up the piece and find a footing in life. You find yourself constantly thinking how can you possibly continue without that one person?
You must realize that not all wounds are intended to heal. Some losses are simply so significant that you may never fully recover from them. You must realize that you may experience both joy and sorrow simultaneously, you can find love again, and you can laugh and smile again. That is not moving on from grief; that is moving forward with it.
To help address your grief better, here are some things we need to understand.
It’s crucial to understand that there is no defined period during which you must grieve after the end of a relationship or the death of a loved one. When they depart, we don’t merely mourn their loss and then feel fine the next day. We mourn their departure from our future as well as all the wonderful times we have shared with them. People grieve in their ways. We can’t say what is there is any right or wrong way to mourn, but we can say that there are always healthy ways to cope. Here are some things you do:
- While you emotionally support yourself, don’t neglect yourself physically.
- Join support groups or reach out to your trusted friends and family members.
- Denial, anger, agitation—grief trigger all these emotions, so accept that.
There is absolutely no need to rush your grief. Processing feelings of loss is confusing and difficult, so allow yourself as much time as you need. We have all heard the phrase, “time will heal your wounds.” While it can be true for some forms of grief, we must recognize that anger, guilt, or regret doesn’t subside with time. These feelings don’t just go away. And there is no problem in accepting that some wounds are not meant to be healed.
It hurts when you lose a friend, a family member, a partner, or anyone you are close to. That loss becomes part of you. It shapes and defines you. Getting rid of these feelings altogether is practically and emotionally impossible. Instead, we carry that baggage as we move forward in life. What helps you cope is what you do after you part with your loved one. Whether it is getting your life together after a breakup or a divorce or doing something that your deceased partner loved to do, there are countless things you can do to heal and grow.
People who experience loss after losing a loved one, ending a marriage, or breaking up frequently are unaware of the importance of recognizing their grief. Most people think that the best strategy for self-preservation is to put on a pleasant facade while you are actually hurting within.
This “fake-it-till-you-make-it” attitude doesn’t work when you are grieving a lost one. All this approach will do to you is it will isolate your feelings. People tend to shy away from their grieve because they soon realize that grieve is often met with a lot of tiptoeing on the eggshells. People are afraid to address your trauma even it is completely okay to grieve after such an ordeal.
Sometimes you are met with unhelpful remarks like “everything happens for a reason”, which honestly is the most unhelpful and unreal thing anybody could say to a grieving person. There are a lot of sympathetic pats on your back accompanied by quick exits like your grief is contagious. This is probably the reason why you feel compelled to hide your pain behind a mask of ignorance. What you need to understand is that whether people accept and acknowledge your pain or not, you should be the one to take the road to acceptance.
You cannot move forward with it if you cannot accept it. You should be able to talk about it and accept it with all the pain that has anchored into you. It’s okay to feel pain, it’s okay to grieve and never heal from that brutal wound. With some things, you just need acceptance and the courage to move forward while wearing the weight of your loss like a trophy that can say “I am Okay”.
Most people believe that when they “move on,” their grief is over. You won’t go to sleep mourning one night and cease thinking about your loss the next. That is not how it works. People close to you will want you to quit grieving and simply stop sobbing, whining, and talking about that person. Perhaps because they want you to get through it, or perhaps because they themselves wish to do the same. People’s perceptions that the pain of loss has subsided cannot suddenly force you to stop feeling it. It’s okay to take your time. The idea behind moving forward is to use your sadness as a tool to empower yourself and to hold on to it as a pleasantly painful memory of the good old days.
Your loss can always come back to haunt you even after years, so moving forward doesn’t end anything. It just teaches you the path to get on with your life after that person is out of it. Keep that person and the time you spend with him in your mind as a beautiful memory but let go of that person from your life.
Grieving, this eight-lettered word is a complex and multi-layered feeling that affects everyone differently. There is no remedy to getting over your loss and pain a little faster because you don’t need to “get over it”, you need to learn to “move forward with it”. Your loss will not necessarily leave your body, but you need to harbor it to gain more strength to keep on pushing the paddle of the cycle that we call life.
The writer is the CEO of MK Group and can be reached at [email protected]