Grief: What it is and the experience of it
The reality we need to come to terms with is that most likely many of us are not comfortable with grief. We live in a world that is nervous about death, sickness and suffering. We desire to avoid this and so talking about and being near someone who is grieving makes us uncomfortable. But as Christians, we should be the last people who fear to talk about grief.
Are we not people who should grieve but grieve with hope and not without it?
Grief - What Is It?
Different Kinds of Grief - Tim Keller says that “A one-size-fits-all prescription for handling suffering is bound to fail, because not only does suffering come in so many different forms but sufferers themselves come with so many different kinds of temperaments and spiritual conditions.”
“The diversity of suffering does not consist only in external factors, however, but also in the internal-the different personalities and temperaments of those experiencing the adversity”
So not only are there different types of suffering and grief, but based upon a person's temperament and their spiritual condition the way they handle, processes and engage with their grief will be different.
Grief is often focused on the loss of a loved one. But there are different types of grief. The loss of a friendship, divorce, impact of abuse, inability to conceive, chronic pain, debilitating disease.
We don’t want to be reductionistic in our views of pain and want to avoid a one size fits all mentality.
What’s the Experience of Grief:
J.I. Packer in his book, Grief Sanctified says that “grief is regularly more draining and harrowing than we thought it could be. As a feeling, it is not unique in that regard: All of us are sometimes overwhelmed-stunned, frightened, devastated, transported by the intensity of our feelings of surprise, pain, fear, love, and joy. We did not know we could feel so strongly; and words fail us to express our feelings adequately.”
Grief has been described as being in a black hole, a walking zombie, everything is gray and dull, you are sleepwalking. It’s as if you are moving in slow motion and nothing computes very quickly. Life is confusing and you are not sure why you feel this way and you wish you could fix it. Deep down there’s fear that this is how life will be forever and the thought is at once terrifying and suffocating. We struggle to get out of bed, there’s depression, emotional collapse, panic, shock, we are hostile, lonely, we experience physical symptoms of grief such as lack of or increase of appetite, tiredness, heaviness in our bodies, difficulty breathing, a hollow feeling in our stomach.
Puritan Richard Baxter, after the death of his wife described his grief as apathy and numbness. The lack of initiative dissolves away and so does the power to empathize with and respond to others. Lewis described grief as a feeling like fear. “At other times it feels like being mildly drunk, or concussed. There is a sort of invisible blanket between the world and me. I find it hard to take in what anyone says. Or perhaps, hard to want to take it in. It is so uninteresting. Yet I want others to be about me. I dread the moments when the house is empty. If only they would talk to one another and not to me.”
It’s the confusion where you don’t want to be alone but you don’t want to be with others either. This confuses people. I don’t want to engage with you but I don’t want you to leave me. I don’t know what I want.
Later Lewis says “And no one ever told me about the laziness of grief. Except at my job-where the machine seems to run on much as usual-I loathe the slightest effort…even shaving.”
“I not only live each endless day in grief, but live each day thinking about living each day in grief.”
No end to the grief, fear that this will be the rest of your life and you can't stop thinking about your how and how it’s affecting you. It’s very hard to be outward focused, grief turns us inward.
Keller, Tim, Walking with God Through Pain and Suffering, 206, 213
Packer, J.I., Grief Sanctified, 143-44.
Lewis, C.S., A Grief Observed, 657, 660.
