Three New Ideas to Support Your Loved Ones (or You) While Grieving

My mom passed away at the end of 2020 after battling cancer for quite some time. I’d already lost my father a few years prior and I expected the experience of losing mom to be more difficult than dad’s passing was. Yet I wasn’t prepared for the magnitude and longevity of the grief I’ve felt since mom passed.

I wasn’t close to my dad, who left the family when I was 15. I wasn’t close to him before he left and him being in another state hours away didn’t foster more closeness either. And while I was sad, I never felt his loss personally. Not on a deep level. I didn’t understand that at the time.

So, when mom passed, I was expecting to feel a deep sadness and some loss. I wasn’t expecting to feel completely changed. Like I was no longer the person I was before. My friend described it to me as untethered. And that is exactly how I felt…and still do at times.

I also wasn’t prepared for how long I’ve felt the grief and how long it’s taking me to figure out who I am as a person in the world now. And those are both in present tense. Almost two and a half years later I still feel immense grief and immense confusion about who I am.

Well-meaning friends and family often don’t understand. Society expects us to push down grief, not show emotions around it and certainly to get our life together ASAP.

I’ve expressed grief and people tend to ignore my statement or they tend to gloss over it because it’s been a while. I’m here to take a stand for all the grieving people in the world.

My stand is that it takes as long as it takes. And as humans, we are 100% allowed to slow down, in fact, I believe it is required. We need to slow down and feel what we feel and allow our body, mind and spirit to process. And yes, I believe that the whole person needs to feel and process.

After all, feelings/emotions, are there to be felt. That is their purpose. To. Be. Felt. And, it’s all okay. Today, I’m sharing three things I’ve observed through my own grief process and how I’m learning to counteract them.

1 — Get Over it Quick! I’m here to tell you that grief is individual to each person. It may take a full year, it may take two, three or even five or eight years to start to feel more normal. And that, my friends, is more normal than this expectation that in just a few months we should be “over it”.

My coach recently shared with me that she had a client (whose sister had died unexpectedly) who burst into tears anytime someone mentioned her sister — for five years. Yes, five years is how long it took her to process the loss of her sister in a way that allowed her to talk about it without strong emotion.

Megan Devine shares in her book “It’s Ok That You’re Not Ok”, that it took eight years to process the grief of the sudden loss of her husband. I highly recommend this book for anyone grieving, by the way.

I’m here to take a stand for you to slow down and process your grief on your own timeline. And if you feel okay in a few weeks or months, then great. And if it takes years, then that is great too.

2 — You’ll Feel Like Yourself Soon. Unfortunately, I don’t believe it for a minute. Loss changes us. Grief changes us. And to expect ourselves to fit right back in our normal slot is just wrong in my opinion.

It goes back to that “untethered” feeling. Once we are in the world without someone who was pivotal for us, we can’t ever go back to the way things were. It takes time to figure out how to BE without that person who meant so much.

I know that for me, a lot of my identity was that I was “Sandy’s daughter”. And while I’m still Sandy’s daughter, she’s not here. And it’s not the same. I don’t fit the same spot as before. And I have to learn to forge a new spot for myself without her. And that is not always easy.

We have to learn a new way to be in the world without the influence, expectation, love and support of that person who was there. In my case more than four decades of my life. And again, it’s not like we can take a magic pill and wake up and have it all figured out. Life just doesn’t work that way with anything, and certainly not with grief.

Again, I take a stand for everyone to have the opportunity to slow this down and allow themselves to explore who they want to be in the world after loss. And guess what, you get to shift and change your mind as much as you want. When it’s right, you’ll know it. And in the meantime, it’s okay, you don’t have to have it all figured out.

3 — Let’s All Avoid Discomfort. A lot of times, people want to gloss over what the griever is feeling simply because it’s uncomfortable. We don’t know how to respond. We don’t know what to say. We don’t want to feel their pain. And, we don’t want to be uncomfortable.

All of this leads us to avoiding the grieving person. Or ignoring what they share about grief. Or glossing over it with a pat on the shoulder or hand and a change of subject. And it just doesn’t work. Certainly, it doesn’t help.

In my opinion, a better response is to just sit with it. A person who is in active grief, doesn’t expect you to have all the answers or the perfect response. I know that all I’ve ever wanted in my grieving moments is to share it. To have someone sit with me in it. And that doesn’t require conversation, or diverting me with a different subject. It requires that they ignore their own discomfort so that I can have mine.

Avoiding discomfort may seem like a good idea, and it’s not. If we never get uncomfortable and push ourselves to do it, then we can’t learn a new way. We can’t grow into the person we are meant to be. Nor can we get through the grief to the other side.

If you are grieving, know that I’m here with you. Taking a stand for you to be in and with your grief however it presents and however long it takes.

If you know someone that is grieving, I encourage you to consider the things I’ve shared here and be open to testing out a different way.

Grief is a part of life and it’s going to touch each of us — especially if we’ve had the privilege to love deeply.

Sherry Parks, CPA, is a Life & Money Mindset Coach who helps women escape feeling trapped by their finances. She is passionate about helping women change mindset, emotions, and actions regarding money, so that they learn to keep what they have and generate more.

Check out her 5 Steps to a Better Money Story workbook or join her women-only Facebook group More Than Enough Money Sisterhood.