A Journey Through Grief, Loss, Hope And Recovery: How Faith Gives You The Freedom To Choose Joy by Deb King

Author:Deb King [King, Deb]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Published: 2022-11-14T22:00:00+00:00

One of the ways that we can process grief healthily is to stay open to it. It’s so much easier to shut down, to refuse to deal with it. Often, we just want to look away. It’s so much easier to face life if we can pretend that the grief isn’t there.

Staying open to grief means that we can access the emotions and share them. I had an opportunity to watch our friend Vince doing this one day when Steve and I sat with him and his wife for lunch. As the conversation covered memories of times gone by with laughter and fondness, one of us asked, “Vince, how is your mom?” Immediately, his tears came.

We knew that this incredible lady, a centerpiece in so many of the memories we had shared, had Alzheimer’s or dementia. Vince’s mom was hilarious, loving, and caring. She was the kind of person you fell in love with when you met her, and her relationship with God was remarkable.

That day, however, tears were at the surface as our dear friend spoke about the mom he could still see physically but had lost emotionally to a disease that was gradually destroying the memories she had of years gone past. He was grieving as he and my husband enjoyed sharing stories, but he didn’t stop talking about it to look away from the grief. Instead, he stayed open. In doing that, he was able to talk about the way forward—a daughter buying her grandma’s house so that the family can continue making memories there, a mother with a deep relationship with God even as her memories are wiped out by her disease.

If he had turned away from his grief and answered with one of the trite phrases we are taught to use: “It is what it is,” ‘Fine,’ “As good as can be expected,” and then changed the subject, that part of his heart that processed his grief that day would have remained unhealed. There is no shortcut through our grief, only the plodding steps that take us one step at a time closer to recovering. Openness is one of those steps.

Moving on Without Letting Go

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