Grief is a process of loss that comes with pain by definition. You can't dress it up or make it lighter. Grief is a physical experience, a psychological one, an emotional one, and sometimes a spiritual one too. Whether we're talking about death, a separation, the loss of hope or some other dramatic change, there's one thing that unites all of these forms of grief: pain.
Grief isn't an illness. It isn't something that's asking to be cured. Grief is a deep, honest and unavoidable response to the loss of something that was precious to us. Most of the time we connect the word grief with death, but the truth is that all of us experience it in one form or another. It can be the loss of a person we love, the loss of a relationship, of a dream that crashed, or even the loss of the identity we had before something changed us.
Coping with grief is brutal. Grief shakes you. It swallows everything, and nothing seems important or meaningful anymore. It's actually one of the hardest emotional things a person goes through in a lifetime.
How do you deal with it? How do you live after a loss? Is it even possible? What do you do with this pain without being swallowed by it, and still find hope? Who am I to say?
