We grieve for the land we left, for a loved one we no longer have, for marriages that have failed, for abilities we lost, or for dreams that shattered. How can we cope better with loss and grief?
The past few months have brought difficulties into our lives that we never imagined, seeping into various areas — from the direct pressure of the war itself, the news, the images, the difficult events, to the personal routine of our individual lives — in marriages, work, dreams, parenthood, and loneliness.
Alongside all this — and sometimes it’s hard for us to admit — like other difficult things, war also brings a kind of awakening, a renewed understanding of what is more important and what is less.
It sharpens the connection between life and death, but even before that, it reminds us that our lives are a matter of choice. And within them, in moments of crisis and in the routine moments, we have more space for decision than we sometimes think. One of those places we have control over, but often feel we don’t, is emotion.
We live in a culture that places emotion in an amorphous world beyond our control, but we have more control over our emotions than we’ve been taught to believe. And sometimes, thinking that our emotions are beyond our control is something that seemingly works in our favor. It allows us to escape responsibility, to avoid the difficulty and effort of navigating our ship through the eye of the storm. We let the sea do its work. In more extreme stages, we freeze and become passive.
One of the most repressed emotional states in people is grief. Grief is the guest we are least interested in inviting into our home. Agreeing to enter grief and feel the losses we are experiencing right now is one of the most challenging tasks we can do. But it is also one of the most transformative because it strengthens important muscles within us, and most importantly, brings us closer to ourselves.
We don’t always want to be close to ourselves, and sometimes this distance is good for us. But sometimes this distance starts to interfere and knocks louder on the door. The “silence” of repression begins to feel burdensome, and the emotion tries to get our attention in various ways.
At this stage, we can continue to repress. In fact, we can always continue to repress. But to open the door, we will need to decide to open it. No one will do this for us — and the door will not open on its own.
We will need to choose grief. To decide to give ourselves the time to mourn. Within this, we will need to courageously and intentionally face some truths that we usually repress: there are things beyond our control; things, including relationships, basic routines, and even life itself — are transient. This is a truth we supposedly hold throughout our adult lives, but we also completely repress it, for various reasons, some of which are important for fulfilling dreams and planning ahead; hard work, good intentions, and all the will in the world do not guarantee us anything, nor do they make anything eternal and invincible; grief is not something we can truly escape from, nor is it something that ever completely ends — something that was very important to us will always hurt that we lost it, and that’s okay.
It can help if we consider that there are cultures in the world that know how to deal with grief better than others. Here too, we will need to consciously understand where we were born into those that are less skilled (such as those that sanctify youth, or connect the success of something to its eternal existence, or at least to our “eternity,” our entire lives). Our work will be harder, but definitely not impossible. We will need to step outside a bit and look from a further perspective in order to successfully choose our way of coping.
Either way, grief is a difficult emotion, but also a very fundamental part of life. Grief does not only occur around the loss of a loved one or the loss of the sense of security we once lived in. We mourn for the land we left, for a person we loved and no longer have, for marriages that failed, for physical or mental abilities we lost. For much of our adult lives, we also grieve, to some extent, the loss of childhood innocence, especially if we were not fortunate enough to have a fulfilling childhood (which shows us that we can grieve even for something we never had). We also grieve for a dream we never fulfilled.
What to do?
1) It’s important to make space for the wide range of emotions that accompany grief: anger and protest, deep sadness and even depression, despair and acceptance. “Making space” simply means — feeling them. Not being afraid to feel, not being afraid to drown in emotion. We are adaptable and resilient creatures, and we have the ability to swim in the sea of emotion without drowning, and to reach the shore when we feel ready. They say “let the wave pass.” Sometimes, for it to pass, we need to swim with it ourselves.
At the same time, it’s important to pay attention to inhibiting emotions that do not help process the loss. One key emotion like this is guilt, which often surfaces in situations where the relationship with what has been lost was not complete or ideal. Feelings of guilt are not helpful to us or to the thing/person we lost, and moreover, they try to “trap” us in place and prevent us from moving forward in life. Connecting again with the knowledge that not everything is in our hands can help release us from guilt.
2) In more advanced stages, in the case of the death of a loved one, for example, we need to learn to change our relationship with that person, who is no longer here. We need to develop new ways to relate to them. We can find comfort in the knowledge that our relationship will continue, it will simply be different. We need to allow ourselves to choose this new relationship, and love it as well, alongside the pain. A similar thing can be done with a place we left, or with a person we lost. Even with the child we once were, we can create different relationships: we can learn to give that child a place in our adult lives.
3) At the same time, we can teach ourselves to develop a new self-perception to reflect the many changes that have occurred around the loss. Discover new and healthy physical and mental ways to be in the world without the person or thing that was and is no longer. We can find new people or activities to redirect the emotional investment we placed in that thing, place, or person.
Here, it is important to embrace the dynamic aspect of life, which also includes us. We tend to identify with what fills our lives, and this is natural and also true to a large extent. But it’s important to remember that we also have the option to change and evolve, even in profound ways. It’s important to remember that we have this option as long as we are alive, regardless of our age, how many years we’ve lived in this country, how long we studied a profession, or how long we’ve been in a relationship. Despite our attachment to stability and permanence, we are incredibly creative and adaptable creatures, and this is available to us as long as we seek it.
One of the privileges of working with grief is seeing how so many people learn and grow from the experience and emerge from their grief better equipped to handle future losses. Over time, they relearn the world that has changed because of the loss, and their ability to act within it.
This is the point at which we can notice that difficult situations, like loss, also bring with them a kind of awakening and a renewed understanding of what is more important and what is less, and sometimes also what now seems right, and what no longer does. This is the stance from which we can take advantage of the opportunity the difficulty offers. “Overcoming” or even “resilience” do not happen automatically or out of psychological necessity, nor out of mere time. They happen through choice. And this is also their nature: we choose how to rise, and where to go.
