What does grief look like? It comes in a variety of colors and hues, and it wears many faces. Grief is more a part of life than many of us realize—since loss is such a frequent life companion.
When we grieve, we each take a different journey. No one can tell you how to grieve. Your process is your process. As in the book Tear Soup we each need to make our own soup recipe, filling the pot with tears, feelings, memories, misgivings and more. Your soup will not taste like mine. Your soup will take a different amount of time to cook than mine. This is an individual process, and we should never judge one another’s grief.
A grief process is not on a schedule either. We cannot foretell the length of the process, nor the shape it takes. We may work through grief’s stages only to think we’ve moved on—when wham! A song, a smell, or another event will send us right back into the grief again. I often say that all we can do is fasten our seat belts and be ready for the ride. It is best to be ready for anything because grief isn’t at all predictable.
Tomorrow: A difficult journey
Today we remember. Bartholomew, apostle. This message was adapted from the “Faces of Grief” resource written by Sonia Solomonson and is available from the Women of the ELCA website.
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