Grief Awareness: What Grieving People Wish You Knew
August 30 is Grief Awareness Day. Throughout the month, we’ll explore different elements of grief, including causes, ways to show support, and what the grieving people in your life wish you knew.
Today, we’ll continue exploring different themes of grief as we prepare for Grief Awareness Day. Let’s take a look at some things grieving people wish everyone else knew.
No one understands.
When someone is experiencing grief, it’s not uncommon for them to feel like no one understands what they’re going through. Though grief is a universal experience, it’s not experienced in one precise way across the board. Grieving people feel that no one understands, because in a way, no one does. No one else has lost exactly what you have lost in this exact way at this exact moment in time, so how can they understand exactly how you are feeling inside of it? Grieving people experience high levels of isolation, because explaining is hard, exhausting even. We asked grieving people what they wish everyone else knew about grief, so let’s unpack.
You need to know.
“Grief becomes part of you. It changes you and lives with you and shapes who you’ll become, even if you grieve in a “healthy” way. You can’t be the same person during your grief that you were before, and it’s insulting when someone judges you for not having the same worldview, values, or attitude on the other side.”
~ Katie
“It’s okay to talk about it – I love to remember the good! Look for the memories and good moments and hold them, journal them, talk about them. In my experience, the joy that has come afterwards has outshined the rainy days.”
~ Hope
“It’s never gone. You never stop missing them. Your life just kind of grows around the grief.”
~ Sam
“No matter what type of grief you’re feeling, it’s okay to feel all of your feelings! Angry, sad, hurt – it’s okay to feel those feelings. Finding things that make you happy and feel seen are important. There’s no linear journey through grief.”
~ Sarah
“Grief isn’t a choice. Sometimes it feels like people think I’m choosing to still be sad, as if I got to choose any of this. Grief is perennial and I’ve had to learn how to carry it with me, instead of thinking I can simply walk around or through it and be done. It’s been four years, and I wish my friends and family could see that I am never going to be the old me again; the new me grieves, and that’s part of the inevitability of life.”
~ Tyler
Grief is love.
There’s a popular saying by Jamie Anderson that “grief is love with nowhere to go.” All of the energy of grief is love for what you’ve lost, finding its messy way in the world.
Megan Devine, author of It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok once said “Your love is your love, and your grief is your grief. It belongs to you. All of it. Every part. It’s not a metric to determine the validity of grief. It’s love. Every part of it is love. And all of it is yours. Every beautiful, difficult, annoying, amazing part.”
Grieving people want other people to know that there is no switch to flip, to turn back time, and get them back to who they were before. Before is over. Grieving people need genuine and gentle support from trusted friends and loved ones as they become new. Sometimes that support comes from familiar loved ones, and sometimes it comes from a new friend. Wherever it comes from, compassion and empathy are the keys to meeting a grieving person where they are. Afterall, none of this simple, there is no map, and nothing is the same.
“There isn’t a right or wrong kind of life event to grieve. Not everyone grieves the same way over the loss of a pet. Not everyone grieves the same way about moving out of a childhood home. Not everyone grieves new life stages the same way. We can grieve individually or as a group, and we might handle grief differently each time we come upon it.”
~ Katie