This isn’t a post about how to explain grief to your children, this is me rambling on what this question made me think about.
When I first think about grief, I think about the people I’ve loved and lost. Either from a tragic accident, old age, cancer, or some health complications, and it made me to think about how loss can sometimes mean change. How grief can signify a change in circumstances. For example, I knew the world before with this person in it, and now my world has changed.
I live in a different world now.
The world can change in other ways too. Relationships change over time, your body can change over time and of course you can change. The obvious one for me was thinking about how I’ve changed after my Cancer diagnosis. I realised that I have had to let go of the “me” I knew before Cancer. I had to grieve for her. Thinking about my “pre-cancer’ Leanne, who lived in a world where she didn’t fear for her life in the “post-cancer” way and who was blissfully unaware. I sometimes wish she was still here.
Another situation where I thought about grief was when I did some training on family estrangement with Dr Sam Barcham . I got reminded how it is very similar and key for processing loss and change. During the training, the terms “frozen grief” and “ambiguous loss” were coined by Pauline Boss which Dr Barcham writes more about here. I think it highlights the significance of feeling grief, going through grief, processing, because when I think about estranged families and their “frozen grief”, it feels like one might be stuck. In a period of unknown. When relationships change, this can be the same too, and can cause a lot of difficulty to come to terms with, which is why I would equate it to processing these changes like processing grief.
I think there are plenty of sages of advice around now on how to deal with grief. People often used to say it was something to get over, but I feel as though there has been a shift on this. One of my favourite metaphors is the grief ball in a box. If you can imagine a ball in a box and on one side of the box there is a pain button. At first, when you first lose someone, the ball takes up the whole box, which doesn’t leave much room for anything else and it’s constantly hitting that pain button. Over time, the ball might change size or texture so it moves around the box differently, and thus not always hitting the pain button, but it still does on occasion which can explain why it can still hurt so much at times, no matter how much time has passed. It gives us the idea that grief is something we can learn to live with, the ball will always be with us, how we live with it depends on the size and texture of the ball. For example, the texture could be seen as a spiky ball if there was a difficult relationship versus a smooth ball representing a happy, peaceful relationship. So it’s not always a smooth process for sure. Grief can be messy. As with most things, it’s personal.
My daughter asked me the question, “What’s grief Mummy?” and at first I didn’t know what to say. But then we spoke about times when someone we knew or a pet that died, or we felt sad about a big change in our life that we didn’t like and the conversation became very personal to her. I know children sometimes want a clear and simple answer, so we didn’t go into too much detail, but it reminded me of my therapy core conditions to work with; congruence, unconditional positive regard and empathy. Grief can look like sadness missing family abroad, it can be anger at the life you thought you were going to have, it can be frustration at yourself for things you wish you did, but didn’t. So it’s still difficult for me to answer what is grief. However it looks, as long as you give yourself time to look at it and sit with it, as difficult as it may be, it’s how we keep going.
I’m sharing this video because years later I still love it and it makes me smile.
Leave a Reply