Grief is a strange thing.
Grief:
Grief is a multi-faceted response to loss, particularly to the loss of someone or something to which a bond was formed. Although conventionally focused on the emotional response to loss, it also has physical, cognitive, behavioral, social, and philosophical dimensions. While the terms are often used interchangeably, bereavement refers to the state of loss, and grief is the reaction to loss.
It is a human thing. Animals experience change, confusion, reaction... but human's experience loss. We can feel it, sense it, taste it, smell it.
Memories bring every sensation back. Smell brings it back. Sight brings it back. Taste. Touch. Sound.
It never goes away. You lose them/it again, and then again, and again, again. It fades, but never leaves. It etches into your soul, carves a ragged gash that bleeds for what seems like forever and then scars. This happens to everyone, at some point in their lives.
I've lost all of my great grandparents and two uncles to death. I've lost friends to time, distance, difference, hurt, and anger. I have loved... and lost love. Old hurts fully scarred, new wounds fully bleeding, pain is a constant.
A mishap as a child left a scar of my head... to this day it hurts to touch it.
The scars in my heart are the same. I didn't lose my head though, when it was injured, it was just... changed. Shaped. Formed. My survival instinct is faster. I avoid danger more quickly, I flinch... often. Flinching gets me teased, but flinching has also kept me alive at times when I shouldn't be.
I gained a flinch from a scar. This is what I didn't learn about my soul until now. I thought loss took away from my soul, whittled away until hardly anything was left. Just a husk that imitated life, emotion, and feeling.
I missed the perspective, the understanding, the realizations, the new life, the hope, the gain. Loss consumed me until I had nothing but loss.
A dear friend of mine told me something someone told him once, "You have to let yourself hurt, however long that takes..." I'm good at that part, I can wallow for months, but he wasn't done. "And when you're done, you're done. You let it go, and move on." Being done, letting go, moving on. I struggle with this, we all do at some point.
God allows grief, I believe, because it grounds us. Without loss there isn't a desire for gain, and motivation would not exist.Without grief... we have nothing to express the loss. We need grief.
Not expressing grief, not showing the pain, refusing to release it from you... it creates a monster inside. One that chews away at who you are, who you want to be, and does its best to convince you that no one understands what you are experiencing. If you believe it, you become an exile... no matter how people reach out, hold you, love on you, push you. It becomes meaningless, life loses purpose and reason.
The monster made a grave error. It told me a lie I could not believe, and I ran to God. I should have been there all along, but I was lost in the fog. Now, the beast is chained, and it has to be starved. It has gorged itself on my fear and pain, I've seen it for what it is, but I am to weak to fight it. I'm not alone, I never was, and people do understand. "But you, O LORD, are a shield about me, my glory, and the lifter of my head. I cried aloud to the LORD, and he answered me from his holy hill." Psalms 3:3-4 (ESV)
I'm not doing well, but I'm also not defeated.
The wounded man, when asked how he is doing, will respond "Not good, but I am alive."
I am alive.
