Dear Grief Guide, I Feel Like I Haven't Grieved My Loss

Despite having lost both her sister and her mother, a listener feels as if she still hasn't grieved their deaths. I read her anonymous letter and then offer her practical tools and compassionate wisdom for growing through grief.

Dear Grief Guide is a weekly advice podcast where I answer anonymous letters from people feeling lost, stuck, or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

Music © Adi Goldstein, Used with Permission

Transcript

Hello and welcome to Dear Grief Guide,

A podcast where each week I answer one anonymous letter from a listener feeling lost,

Stuck,

Heartbroken,

Or overwhelmed in the midst of grief.

My name is Shelby Forsythia.

I'm a grief coach and author,

And I'm here to help you create a life you love from the life loss forced you to live.

Let's get to today's letter.

Dear Grief Guide,

My younger sister Janice passed away four years ago on June 4th.

I recently realized I have not grieved her properly.

When I see posts about her or think about her,

I move on quickly and do not allow myself to feel the full impact of the loss.

This has left me feeling profoundly sad.

She was a wonderful woman,

Only 63,

And we used to talk nearly every day.

I was the person who had to break the news of Janice's death to our 93-year-old mother,

And it was heartbreaking.

She passed away 11 weeks after my sister.

I was caring for her in a senior living facility,

And she was so sad after my sister died.

I sometimes wonder if my sister's death broke my mother's heart,

And I regularly question if I really grieved my mother's loss as well.

On the anniversary of my sister's passing,

I posted photos of her on Facebook and wrote some thoughts about her.

When I mentioned to a close friend that I had never really grieved Janice,

She wrote me privately a day later and suggested I get some help with this loss.

I recognize I need to grieve,

But I'm not sure how to process these deep losses.

Do you have any advice or know of any support groups or classes that can help me navigate this grief?

Thank you so much.

Signed,

Am I Really Grieving?

Hi there,

Am I Really?

I wonder,

I hear so many statements and so many stories like yours,

And so many people use this language of feeling like I haven't grieved or I've not grieved properly,

Or there's something that they haven't dived into with regard to their grief,

As if they haven't spent the time in the time since their loved one's death grieving,

As if that is not also grief.

For me personally,

Grief begins when the loss occurs,

Sometimes even before,

If we're anticipating a loss,

We can very much grieve people and things that are still alive,

And then we grieve them in new and different ways after their deaths,

Literal or metaphorical,

Such as in the case of a relationship ending.

So I want to start this by asking a clarifying question.

What do you mean when you say grieve properly?

Because the answer is different for everybody.

For some people,

Grieve properly means I haven't cried over it yet,

Or we never got to host a memorial,

Or I didn't get to get together with people and tell stories.

I feel like they don't have a proper place in my home.

I feel like I don't do enough to honor them on significant milestone days.

I feel disconnected from them.

What are your individual benchmarks for you,

Unique to you?

Am I really grieving?

What are your benchmarks of successful,

As you put it,

Grieving?

As much as you can frame grief as anything that you can have success at,

Because I don't necessarily know that you can win at grief.

I think a lot of people perceive grief as a game or something to be overcome,

Especially in our society.

Sometimes I want to get away from this idea of like,

I can win at grief,

Or I can be done with grief.

But I wonder what you mean by,

What does it mean to succeed at properly grieving?

Framed another way,

What do you feel is missing from your grief experience?

Because in your letter you mentioned,

You're already remembering her by sharing memories and telling stories on social media.

That is a way of grieving.

That's absolutely a way of mourning,

Of remembering somebody,

Of carrying their life forward and their impact on your life.

So what do you feel is not present in this picture that you would like to be?

And then you could point at it and say,

Now I've grieved.

I've done the work of grieving,

Or I have participated in my grief in some way.

You mentioned in the first paragraph of your letter that you don't allow yourself to feel the full impact of your loss.

And I wonder,

I'm asking you a lot of questions here today,

But are you afraid to feel the full impact of the loss?

There's so many people I work with who speak of what they refer to as like an emotional hangover.

I'm afraid of going into my grief.

I know I can,

But I don't know if I'm going to be able to get back out again.

If I let myself feel that sad,

I may not be able to get unsad,

Or I may never feel happy again,

Or I may break myself,

Or I may go crazy,

Or at my very worst,

I might die.

The pain of that might actually kill me.

There is a very real fear that our grief brains can have of dying or being destroyed if you quote,

Unquote,

Let it all in.

And I don't want to discount that.

I think that is a very real fear that a lot of grieving people had.

It's one that I had as well.

And when I finally allowed myself to wail for my mother's death,

For everything that had been taken from me,

Not just her life and our future together,

But my faith and my sense of home and the way my life was supposed to go,

And just all the things that were supposed to be true but couldn't be,

And all the things I lost in losing her,

The thing I feared the most didn't happen.

I didn't get committed to a mental institution.

I didn't have the police called on me.

And I didn't die.

I was not broken.

In fact,

And I write about this in my first book called Permission to Grieve,

I felt like I had returned myself to myself in some way.

Like I had finally let in something that I was using a lot of energy to block out.

If you are afraid of feeling the full impact of this loss,

Because you are scared of not being able to get back out of those feelings again,

That the feelings may never end,

That there's no way through,

That it's just sinking into the quicksand of grief and then there's no way out,

I really,

Really encourage you to join us in Life After Loss Academy.

It's not a checklist for grief.

It's not here's your assignments,

Boom,

Boom,

Boom,

Boom,

Boom,

And now you've grieved and now you're complete.

But and it is a path.

It is a step by step roadmap that prepares you to feel hard things,

The emotions of grief,

The experience of releasing what loss has made no longer true.

What the deaths of your sister and your mother mean for your life,

Both what you lost in the past and what you will lose in the present,

Because they are no longer here.

And then going forward how to integrate their memories and their lives into your life,

Remembering them,

Allowing your grief to show up in relationships with others and ultimately finding a place for grief to exist within your life that feels not threatening,

Not like a thing that's still incomplete that you have yet to do,

But like a collaborator,

Like something that is allowed to exist alongside you,

Like something that wants to help.

That is the work that we do in Life After Loss Academy.

And so many grieving people I work with come in feeling exactly this way.

If I have never grieved my loss,

I don't know how,

I don't know how to grieve as a skill.

And to be fair,

None of us does until we go through it.

And then there are some people like myself and thousands and thousands of others who make up maps of here's how we get through it together.

And you do not have to go this alone.

You do not have to risk your heart going into grief and not being able to get out again.

And I want to give you this permission slip too.

You do not have to measure your grief based on what other people think it means to grieve.

You are not required to cry.

I have met grieving people who have never cried once for their loss,

Yet we still call it grief.

I have met people who feel like they may never get grief right.

Yet we still call it grief.

I have met people who are not sure what success would mean to them in grief,

But they know that what they are going through is grief that we can validate together.

I would so love to work with you,

Whether in Life After Loss Academy or on some one on one basis,

Am I really grieving?

And one of the best places you can start is at the workshop that I'll mention at the end of this podcast.

It's free.

It's a taster of what you can expect inside the course of what the course outline looks like of what you'll learn.

And then I'll give you three tools that you can use right away in your grief to acknowledge the fact that it exists,

To give yourself so much grace and compassion,

And to stop feeling like you're forcing grief down or away and start allowing grief to show up in ways that feel generative and creative and maybe in your language,

Successful or proper.

I'm so curious to hear from you again,

I hope you'll write me back.

Or even just sit with these,

If you don't write me back,

Just to sit with these questions and come to some answers might be worth asking your grief,

Dear grief,

What does it mean to grieve properly?

And listen for its answer,

Because I bet it has some wisdom for you.

Good luck.