Grief is about more than death

The following is something I saw floating around support groups that spoke to me as a good explanation of grief throughout all facets of life. On another post I will explore how I have walked through and beyond grief to live a happy life again. 

AUTHOR UNKNOWN:

I want to say this because it does not get said enough: Most grief you experience in your life will have nothing to do with death.

This is not talked about enough and as a result people struggle to process grief because the world is telling them grief is something else.

Grief is about loss and if you'd like to define it as a loss of life, it is not restricted to loss of life via death. Even then I'd implore you to not view grief as about death or life but again, just loss.

Grief is also about having an awful childhood that nothing can fix even if you have healed from it as an adult; your childhood was awful and there’s nothing retroactively you can do about it. You grieve the loss of thriving that your past self was denied.

Grief is about friendships that ended abruptly, confusingly and again, there's nothing you can do to change that. You just have to sit with it. This is the only way grief can ultimately be processed and all it wants by the way, is to be accepted and sat with. That's it.

Grief is about opportunities that have passed, experiences you didn’t have because of the way situations have ended up, and having to accept that while you do have your whole future ahead of you, there were some things you wanted to be a certain way back then and they weren't, aren’t and never will be.

Grief is being estranged from your family and missing family closeness.

Grief can be the job you lost, the plans that fell through, the events that spiraled out of your control.

If grief is strictly about life and death, understand that it includes grieving the life you never had and the death of who you used to be, too.

But moreover, grief is about loss.

Author unknown.