Grief gets a raw deal. It is often considered an unwanted, undesired, avoidable feeling – an emotion carrying nothing but dark despair. And if not handled with care, grief can become all these and more. So why does grief get a bad name? Can it be turned into an experience that leads to transformation and growth? My answer is yes, it can.
In a span of a little less than three years, I lost both my parents. My mother’s passing was sudden and completely unexpected, on the other hand, I witnessed my father slipping a little every day, for over a course of few months.
I don’t know if I experienced all stages of grief but I do know that and I am not even sure if everyone goes through them all, that too in the same order. For example, when we lost our parents, my sister and I grieved differently. Not just that, our individual reaction and processing of loss of each of our parents was also different with their passing.
The bottom line is that each loss is different, it will impact you differently and it is your individual battle. You have to fight it your own way. It definitely helps to strong support system, but at the end of the day, you have to find a way out if it on your own.
When I lost my mother, I was in deep shock because it happened so suddenly that we had no time to prepare ourselves. She was there one moment, and gone the next. There were so many unspoken things between us and till this day, there are moments when I almost pick my phone to speak to her – seek her advice, ask for a recipe or simply share some gossip. The suddenness of her leaving us made it very difficult for us to terms with it.
On the other hand, with our father, we got some time to prepare ourselves for his passing as we saw his condition deteriorating over few months. We were given an opportunity to tell him how much we loved him and create some more happy memories that will stay with us forever.
In both the cases though, what helped me bear the loss was to find ways of keeping their essence in things I could do in my day-to-day life.
My mom was a very social person. She was great at building and nurturing relationships. After she passed away, I decided to take on her responsibility of keeping in touch with her friends and all our relatives. This meant not just making new connections, but also rekindling old ones. It has been three years now that my mom passed away, but getting reminded how she touched lives of so many people, warms my heart. This is my way to stay connected to her and safeguard her legacy.
It's only been three months since my father passed away, and I deeply feel the void created by his absence. He used to call me his sparring partner because he and I debated on multitude of issues and topics, not always seeing eye to eye. He encouraged independent thinking in both my sister and me. He encouraged us to question everything and develop a world-view free of prejudice and bias of any sort.
While going through his things, I came across his diary and notes. After his retirement, he had started to chronicle his life experiences. He had wanted to publish them in form of a book. In one of the notebooks, I came across the chapter titles of the book he intended to write. This has now become my project to undertake.
Carrying on my mom’s legacy has made me look outward and value people in my life, and continuing my dad’s dream is making me look inward to understand myself better. In both cases, I see myself growing as a person.
With grief, usually people live in denial or are consumed by it. Living in denial only pushes the impact for later and makes it more intense when you finally accept it, if you do at all. This is also consuming in a different way. Your emotions keep simmering under the surface, damaging you in ways that you don’t understand.
So, we come to the all-important question that when grief can be so overwhelming, how can one grow with it? The answer to that is simple, but hard to accomplish. It begins with acceptance of loss and then finding ways to use it to propel your emotional growth. The grief I felt at losing my parents became the driving force for me to internalize their essence in a way that they live through me in some manner. If embraced, grief can transform a person into a better version of themselves. This is Growing with Grief!
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