Explosive Times

​‘When I was small I wondered what made big stuff move. Now I am big I know why small things matter’.

Everyone is travelling through grief at different stages and different intensities, at different times in different directions and with different outcomes. Some will get stuck in stages, while others will move between them all and still others will progress through to the ultimate goal, acceptance. 

Grief is not something you get over or take a pill for and be cured within a specific time frame. There is no vaccine for it and it is constantly with us at all times, we just don’t notice until the big events of life hit us hard enough that we can’t just blow it off. 

Just being alive brings us into contact with grief full time. 

Any change in our life circumstances is enough to trigger its symptoms and because change really is life’s only constant we are trapped in its gravitational pull. Losing your job or the breakup of a relationship will create grief. Moving house or location, growing older and children leaving home will do it nicely. Becoming sick and dying will give grief a free pass through an open door. 

Anything that involves loss will alert grief states, stages and symptoms, but no two people will have the same experience. 

Which is why at such heightened occasions such as death and dying, individuals and their reactions can be unpredictable in the extreme. Life becomes very bent and twisted from following no standard rules or regulations and the explosive results can blow everything apart or drag it together. 

Grief is not a malaise to conquer; it is a part of life not apart from it and living with grief and folding it into the fabric of our existence is really all we can do.

To accept, that is the lesson that grief is with us to teach.

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