How to Grief – A Bereavement Guide
As of the 9th of July 2021 ·,4,010,834, people have died so far from the coronavirus COVID-19 outbreak worldwide, as reported to WHO.
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It’s hard to find someone in the world today whose world has not been torn asunder by the loss of a loved one. Horrific stories are aplenty of the loss that people had suffered. How many of you were not able to say goodbye? To see your loved ones before their final moments? How many of you were told by a nurse or a doctor over the phone that your mother or father, brother, or sister had passed away? How many of you had to arrange online funerals or send actual invitations to people to attend a funeral? How bizarre! Funeral Invitations are actually a thing now.
Our loss throws us into a place of uncertainty. It’s a time of turmoil. Grief is intense and chaotic and we often ask ourselves in our time of grief “Am I losing my mind?”.
What is grief?
Grief is the celebration of a gift from God through our tears. The only way we can avoid grief is never to love. The more and deeper we love, the more intense our grief will be. Grief is the price we pay for loving someone. Grief is fatiguing, it is emotional and physical tiring. Grief touches every part of our lives.
David gave us a good view of what grief looks like;
“Be merciful to me, Lord, for I am in distress; my eyes grow weak with sorrow, my soul and body with grief. My life is consumed with anguish and my years by groaning; my strength fails because of my affliction, and my bones grow weak.
Psalm 31:9-10
Bereavement Guide
Since the death of your loved one, It is not a trip you planned, but it is a trip you must take. Several factors will shape your journey, and you can take intentional steps to point yourself in a healthy, healing direction, so you will not get lost in the deep woods of grief. But to get through your grief…you should actually start grieving!
It is important to remember in your time of grief that there are no manual, formal instructions, procedures, or formulas for grief. You are unique. Your grieving process is unique. Your emotions are unique. Don’t ever try to follow someone else’s ‘formula’ for grief. There is no right or wrong way to grief, so don’t expect others to feel the same as you do! There is nothing wrong with you if you don’t express your grief in the same way that others do! You had a unique attachment to the deceased that will influence your grief and makes it different from anyone else’s.
One of the most important things to remember in your time of grief is always to be very honest with yourself about what and how you are feeling. Allow each and every emotion to play out, and allow yourself to feel the full extent of every emotion. Never suppress, hide, or push your emotions of grief away. There are real negative consequences to suppressing your grief. Always remember that these very intense feelings of grief won’t last forever, but suppressing it, will only prolong the process!
One of the goals of the grieving process is to realize that the reality is that your loved one has passed away, that he or she is not here anymore. That you now have to continue your life and work without him or her, trying to find your identity in life without him or her.
When grieving we know with our head that the person is indeed gone, but sometimes it can take your heart up to six months or more to catch up with what your brain already knows.
Sometimes the grieving process can feel just too long and too painful. You might feel that you rather want to avoid places and people that remind you of your loved one. However, you must push through. You will have to make a conscious effort to grief.
You need to understand that it is okay to heal, it is okay to move on with your life, that your healing is not a sign of disrespect. Lessening of pain does not indicate a lessening of care. Don’t think if you allow yourself to grief, that you are going to forget the person, or that your healing means to forget or disrespect them. That if you make progress in your grief and when your pain is becoming less, that they are insignificant and that they didn’t really matter.
It is also very important not to isolate yourself in your grief. There is definitely a time to be alone with your thoughts and to take time to reflect on your feelings and emotions in your time of grief, but never isolate yourself!
Doing grief work means rolling up your sleeves and doing the tough stuff. I would contend that if we don’t do those things, we really won’t ever completely heal. If you shy away from those tough things, feelings and emotions, if you do not approach the grieving process goal-oriented, you get stuck in your grief, and you will never get to a place of emotional healing, or at a place where you can move on.
The grieving process is never easy, and we can never prepare ourselves for it. But maybe, if you can understand a few things about grief and if we have some information about the grieving process, it can help you to get through it healthily. The grieving process is to help us to bid farewell to your loved one that died.
God and our Grief
God listens to our lamentations, He understands our hurts and wants to comfort us, but He can’t comfort us if we shut him out from our grieving process.
When we go through sufferings, we often cry out to God, “Why Lord?” and what we’ve always believed before, we question now. Often we can’t understand why God allowed our loved ones to die. We often get angry with God for not preventing it, or for not saving them, or for not answering our prayers and healing them.
0ften in our grieving process, we move further and further from God instead of closer to Him. He is often the last place we look for comfort but must be our first place for comfort.
Anger at God is always a result of our own conclusion that a perfect God has treated us unjustly. We have no right to question or judge God and His decisions. God is merciful and understands our pain and frustration
God doesn’t owe us any explanations as to why our loved ones died. The thing is, even though he made us sit somewhere, giving us a word-for-word explanation as to why our loved ones had to die, we still wouldn’t have understood or accepted it!
“The secret things belong to the Lord our God, but those things which are revealed belong to us and to our children forever, that we may do all the words of this law.”
Deuteronomy 29:29
We’ll have to come to a place where we trust God without all the answers. God is good, God understands and is sovereign. God doesn’t have to answer all our ‘why’ questions. We seek answers, but God isn’t always going to explain everything to us. We have to trust Him that He knows and does best for us. We can pray and ask God to reveal to us what He wants, to make our hurt lighter.
Can we really demand answers from God? Does God really need to answer all your questions and ‘whys’? What did God say to Job when Job demanded answers from God?
“Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, Things too wonderful for me, which I did not know.”
Job 42:3b
“Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth. Tell me, if you have understanding!”
Job 38:4
Can we really demand answers from the Creator of Heaven and Earth?
Why did my loved one have to die?
We cannot see the future, God can, God might see something in our deceased loved one’s future we cannot possibly see:
- God might see that they would have lost their salvation in the future
- Your loved one might have cost someone else their salvation
Sometimes God saves our loved ones from further enduring the evil of this world.
The righteous perishes. And no man takes it to heart; Merciful men are taken away. While no one considers that the righteous are taken away from evil.
Isaiah 57:1
Sometimes we are so angry with God for ‘taking’ our loved ones and argue “Because I do what God wants me to do, I am good, I am serving him, why did He do this, why did he ‘take’ my loved one?”
We believe that something was taken from us that we cannot live without and that there is no way out of this.
However, we may ask: “Did this person really belong to you? Were you the owner of your loved one or just a steward? Was the person really taken from you?” How can someone be taken from you if they didn’t belong to you in the first place?
You forget that God’s plans are not your plans, this is having false expectations from God, and we also forget that God does not owe us! We believe God is only good if He does things my way. We had a clear plan for ourselves and our loved ones, when this plan doesn’t play out how we imagined, we cannot understand and are angry and surprised how God didn’t have the same plan as we did.
God will not be held hostage by you, we serve God, He does not serve us! Even if God came to your house today, sat down and had a cup of tea with you, and explained everything to you, why your loved one died, will you accept it? Will you be satisfied? Will, you really understand the full extent of what He is saying to you?
Don’t mistreat and misjudge God in your time of grief and ask yourself “How much repenting will I have to do because of my grieving?”
Ask God to help you to accept your loved one’s passing, don’t camp in the Why Valley, you can get stuck there for a very long time!
Let go of your anger, regret, and guilt, don’t trap yourself in responsibilities that do not belong to you. Thinking that something you did or didn’t do could have saved your loved one makes you sovereign! Just as the very hour, minute, second of your birth was predetermined, so are everyone’s deaths. Nothing you did or didn’t do could have changed it. There is nothing you can do to extend your or anyone else’s life with a second! Ask yourself, was I really responsible? What is the reality? Even if your loved one committed suicide, it was their choice, you cannot and should not take responsibility for their decisions. You don’t have the responsibility for other’s decisions!
Don’t get stuck in your regret. Don’t live in the past. You might end up losing years of your own life in a sea of regret that you can never get back….
Your eyes saw my substance, being yet unformed. And in Your book, they were all written. The days fashioned for me, when as yet there were none of them.
Psalm 139:16
Grieving Guidelines
- We have to go through the whole grieving process to fully heal.
- There is no shortcut in the grieving process! We go through this pain so we can heal because our pain heals us!
- Say to yourself this: “Here’s where I am now. I’m going to start accepting it. I hate it, but God is at work. I can’t feel it, but I’m going to trust Him to see me through this process.”
- Remember, be honest with yourself about what you feel in your grieving process, don’t pretend everything is okay! If you’re honest with yourself and others about what and how you feel, you’ll feel more stable and soon be back on safe footing!
- Don’t withhold your tears!
- If you cry and mourn it’s because you loved someone.
- There is nothing wrong with you if you grieve differently from the people around you. There is no right or wrong way of mourning, everyone mourns differently.
- Remember, don’t try to compare your raw process to someone else’s, you also can’t try to mourn the same as someone else, what works for one person isn’t necessarily going to work for you. Everyone mourns in their own way.
- Try to find your identity without the person in your life. Who are you now that the person is no longer there? What is your identity now that they are no longer in your life? It’s important to establish a new identity now that they’re no longer there. Previously, your identity was attached to them, now you have to have an identity without them in your life.
- Don’t try to be ‘efficient’ in your grieving process.
- Talk about your loved one regularly.
- Share as many memories of your loved one as possible with others.
- Don’t think if you’re going to ignore your mourning that it will go away.
- If you’re sad, be sad. Don’t avoid or suppress your hurt.
- There is no ‘acceptable’ period in which to mourn. Mourning can take months or even years.
- The grieving process blocks our opinion of God.
- There is a clear difference between isolation and loneliness, never isolate yourself in your grief.
- Solitude is good for grief, spend time with your own grief, your thoughts, and God, but never isolate!
- Remember: Your loved one died…you didn’t!
- Grief is never progressive, you will often take two steps forward, three steps back, grief is not linear, it’s cyclical.
Important Practical things to help you heal
Here are a few practical tasks you can do, not just to assist you in your healing process, but also to cement the memory of your loved one before years make it fade.
- Start journaling your grief journey as soon as you can after your loved one’s passing. Write down all your feelings, what you are struggling with, what you are feeling. This is very private, it’s your thoughts and feelings. This is also a very good thing to help kids and teenagers to start after losing a close family member. Buy a beautiful notebook and journal as often as you can.
- Write a letter to your loved one where you tell them all the things you didn’t get to say, things you wanted to say. I have a client that writes a letter to her husband every week, telling him everything that has happened in the past week, news about the kids, and everyday life. She has been doing it for close to a year now, and she says it really helps her.
- Make a beautiful picture collage or scrapbook of the person’s life
- Create a memory box. These days you can buy the most beautiful boxes. Fill this box with your loved ones’ favorite things. Things you can put in this box:
- A bottle of their favorite perfume/cologne or aftershave
- Recipes of the favorite food
- Pictures
- Jewelry or small clothing items like a favorite scarf or tie
- CD’s, DVD’s or memory stick with their favorite music
- Movie, theatre, or plane tickets of places you visited together
- The letter or letters you wrote after their passing
- A note with all their favorite scriptures and sayings
The possibilities are endless of what you can put in this box. I am sure as time goes by you will think of things you should put in your box. Having more than one box is also a good idea. Maybe a wife or husband you can make one, and then you can make another one with your children, they can add artwork they made or things they want to put in the box.
5.Write your own beautiful memories of the person and also ask people that were very close to the deceased to write down their treasured memories of him/her and have these bound in a book.
6.Think of ways you continue your loved one’s legacy. Maybe a plaque on a bench or tree in the park, a scholarship or trophy in their name at the local school, or club, or create a tribute in honor of a cause they supported.
The grieving journey is by no means an easy one. If you feel that you are not coping, or that you cannot get past your anger, regret and guilt, try and find a counselor or therapist or even a grief support group that can assist you through this journey.
Photo by Alexander Krivitskiy from Pexels
