Tuesday, August 30, 2011

Healing from Grief

Sometimes it takes a long, long time.

I noticed last fall, after seven years, that the loss was still there, but the tears weren't. And then, recently, Pastor brought up something in Bible class that Pastor Wiest had preached. The part more interesting to me, however, was that he prefaced his words with a parenthetical comment on loss and grief. He said that he could see something in a movie now and it would make him smile to remember Steve. The loss is still there, but the depth of gut-wrenching grief isn't. There's fondness now in memories instead of just tears and more tears. Yes! That's it!

Discovering this (I mean, experiencing it and not just knowing it intellectually) helps me expect that God will carry me through other losses and that healing will, eventually, come.

4 comments:

  1. Yes. "Like." Thank you, Susan. I think, too, that this applies whether the loss is huge, as when death takes a loved one, or on a smaller scale. We grieve the smaller stuff, too, and that grief can hang with us longer than we might expect and hurt more than we imagined. Thank God that we can go to Him with the little boo-boo's as well as the medium-sized and big ones and that He hears and cares for them all.

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  2. Took me twenty years to stop crying at Easter.

    English needs a word for that bittersweet, lovely, warm, hurting ouchie-but-I-don't-wanna-let-go-of-it-ness of what you're talking about.

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  3. Thanks, Susan. It's good to know that I won't cry forever.

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  4. Melanie, I was thinking about you too as I wrote this, hot just me and some people around here. Being years, it may seem like forever. But eventually the tears lessen. As Pastor says, it will never be right in this lifetime, and we may very well go on missing the person deeply until our own death. In time, though, the poignancy and the loss will not be so sharp. I knew that in my head, but for so so long, it didn't seem to be panning out in my experience.

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