With all the constant ups and downs that grief brings, the continuous torture and pain when I am low and the being okay when I am high. I have found that I don’t hate grief itself. I hate that I have grief. I hate that it was forced upon me. And I hate that because of grief my heart breaks a little every day. But grief itself, I have found, is not bad. In fact, I see grief as a coping mechanism, directly from God. It is God’s way of allowing humans to sit in their sorrow and grow from their pain. Grief allows you to process your loss and feel all the emotions that go along with it. We are humans, we must learn to feel and confront our emotions because they are a bigger part of who we are and how we were created. But as most people know emotions need to be processed. This goes for any sort of emotions that we feel but is especially prevalent for grief. C.S. Lewis, in his book A Grief Observed, states:
“Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process. It needs not a map but a history…”
Like any large scale of emotion that can plague our minds, grief must be seen as a process and not a state of mind. Therefore, we move through grief. This is comforting not only because it seems that it is a load that will be lessened with time, but also that our emotions are validated.
Like any process, grief has its highs and lows, twist and turns. C.S. Lewis says it in this way,
“Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape. As I have already noted, not every bend does. Sometimes the surprise is the opposite one; you are presented with exactly the same sort of country you thought you had left behind miles ago…”
I don’t think I can come up with a better illustration of what grief feels like. Lewis goes on to explain that he thinks grief is not a circle but a rather is full of “particular reoccurrences”. To this, for myself, I would not agree (which is okay, everyone’s walk with grief is different). To this I would say that for myself, grief sometimes does feel like a journey filled with circles. Sometimes you are stuck in the hamster wheel, that cycles around for hours, days, weeks and maybe even months at a time. You can go to and from different hamster wheels and sometimes you can leave them and never go back, because you have processed through them and created understanding. But sometimes there are hamster wheels that are impossible to process through because there is no receiving of answers or understanding. Those are the wheels that are reoccurring and will never go away. Instead, one must learn to be at peace with them, otherwise the continuous cycle in those wheels can lead to deep depression and madness.
That being said, to me, grief feels like a winding road filled with a series of pot holes. Grief itself is crippling, so therefore, walking along roads with deep holes is dangerous and gives higher chances for you to fall in. Some holes are large and some holes are small. But each hole contains the hamster wheel.
Now you might be wondering, “Okay, that sounds awful. Where does God fall into this?” Well, I’ve found in my brokenness, that God is the one picking me up and moving my injured body every day. However, God doesn’t put me in those pot holes. I fall in on my own doing, usually when I am trying to move on my own. Sometimes (rarely) I have the mental stability to pull myself out of my hamster wheel hole. However, generally, I don’t. Generally, I get stuck in my pot hole. And when you’re all the way down there it’s easy to look up at the blue sky above and feel more and more helpless as the time goes. You feel worse and worse. You start to wonder where God is, because lets be honest, it feels like He’s outside that hole looking down at you. But our God isn’t that guy who stands outside the pot hole yelling “Hey down there! You got this! You can do this! Push yourself up! You’re almost out!” No, our God, is the God who climbs down in that hole with you. He meets you in your deepest darkest hole and says “I’ve got you. Let me help you out. Stand on my shoulders and I will boost you up. Let me carry you.” And all it takes is for you, deep down in your hole to look up and say “God, I need you. I can’t do this on my own.”
I should be doing that every day. Because once you’re out of that hole, God shows you things on a whole new perspective (which is why I am writing this right now). But I don’t do that every day. I don’t like to, because I don’t like admitting that I am weak and sometimes the holes become comfortable (which is weird because that’s like saying you’re comfortable in your own pain). Sometimes you don’t want to crawl out of our hamster wheel hole because you are looking for answers and you don’t want to leave until you find them. And those are the times when we need God the most. Because those are the times when we can’t understand and God is compassionate enough to pull us out of those holes before we drive ourselves mad. I think grief is probably the most extreme example of this in our lives, but I also think people can go through this in other ways. It’s an interesting process of life that all humans must take.