Grief Awareness Day

On Grief Awareness Day, I want to pause and share a deeply personal reflection. This is not a teaching or a framework, but a Letter in the Clearing—a story from my own journey with loss.

I had been sleeping in the lazy boy chair next to her bed for over a month. I started feeling such anxiety that my mom would get up in the middle of the night and fall again.  A residual memory was still so traumatizing in my heart. Now, I needed to hear every breath and feel every motion.

After a one-month evacuation due to Hurricane Ida and a few unexpected turns, my mother became bedridden in just two days. Her decline was sudden and unrelenting. At 4:19 a.m. on October 8, 2021,  I watched her take her final breaths in this life…

Walking with her through cognitive decline, and then the shock of lung cancer and four masses on her lungs likely stage 4 changed me forever. How could they have missed this. I was relentless; my mom had two thoracenteses’ where fluid was drawn from her lungs and supposedly tested and nothing was found – now she’s dying with lung cancer?! Once you truly experience loss that hits you personally, it’s an entirely different experience. I was grieving many things in this moment including feelings so common with family caregivers of chronic illness – inadequacy, loss of control, being forced to surrender instead of fight. The grief shifted on me – I had to shift with it. No theology, dissertation or therapy tool or practice here – just weeping, and my own trauma response…

Some life experiences simply do what they do - they change you. The moment marks a shift – how you see the world, relationships, time, life, joy, God – everything.

Each loss is unique and grief from the death of a loved one carries such personal emotions. When we think of our relationships within a family – each one is different. In loss through a death each person’s relationship with the person that dies is different.

Through the loss of both my parents, and my grief service to support others I see too often, how grief and loss are not only emotional and psychological traumas but can create such spiritual distress as well.  On the spiritual side of things I’ve heard many different theological views, some of those views unfortunately create avoidance and/or dismissal of navigating the very real painful and perhaps conflicting emotions associated with grief and loss. As a Christian remember, Jesus grieved. Last I looked we are not Jesus – as part of the human experience we each will stumble through the messy maze of grief as our own selves with support systems that are right for you. (i.e. counseling, pastoral care, support groups, etc.)

As I have moved through my own grief, I’ve come to understand the totality of my journey as “Holy Grief” (which I will share more about in our coming Grief Groups and Caregiver Circles).

Death is hard. Sobering. It brings us face-to-face with our own mortality. Not all grief feelings are the same because not all relationships are the same. For some it may feel like a sacred turning point. Just this week families woke up to news that their little one’s weren’t ever coming home from the school shooting. How traumatic and unexpected! One can’t even get to the grieving until they start processing through the trauma. As a counselor and chaplain, Over time, I’ve come to notice that grief itself often feels traumatic—no matter how it arrives. Whether sudden or expected, it shakes us in ways we can’t always name.

The loss of both my parents has absolutely left a powerful imprint on me. Caring for my mother until her death has left me with a different experience of grief than the losing my father suddenly when he died quietly sitting in the pulpit of his church that horrible night in 1991.

But – the journey through it has also transformed me. The reason grief isn’t a one and done is because when it’s your grief – specifically from the death of someone you care about life moving forward is a life-long adjustment to learning to live life apart from them. There will continually be experiences that for the first time you are having without them. This is worthy of sad days and weeping not only days or years later but even decades.

“Once you truly experience loss that hits you personally, you know it.”

If this reflection resonates with you, I invite you to journey with us in upcoming Grief Groups and Caregiver Circles. Together, we can honor both the pain and the hope in our grief.

In Love