When most people think about grief, they think about loss after death.
So when you first realize you are grieving someone that hasn’t actually died, the experience can be incredibly confusing.
We can grieve a lot of different losses that aren’t due to death:
A parent who we may be estranged from or the parent you needed
The loss of relationship due to addiction, abuse, or disease like dementia
A marriage
Your faith
Your community
Fertility
Childhood trauma
An identity you once had: Christian good girl, the caretaker, the strong one, the people pleaser
The person you were before chronic illness or disease took over your life
Maybe you’re wondering:
“Why can’t I just get over this?”
“Why am I still thinking about it?”
“Why does this hurt so much when nobody died?”
The truth is, there’s nothing wrong with you. There is a term for this type of loss. It’s called Ambiguous grief.
Here’s a definition from my essay, “Resilience in the City of Ghosts” that was recently featured in Memoir Monday’s best personal essays on the web:
“Ambiguous grief is an open-ended grief without resolution. No funeral to mark the end, no body with your hopes for what the relationship could have been. There is nothing concrete—no tombstone or funeral—to cling to to validate the sense of loss. All that remains is the hope of what could have been.”
The problem is there is no set roadmap to ambiguous grief like there is for death.
Yet, processing that grief is still incredibly important. For those of us who grew up in faith communities, it is especially for us to pay attention to as we often learned to spiritually bypass negative feelings and focus on the positive.
But that is not how we heal.
In this week’s Live, Lauren (The Grief Circle) and I discuss the roadmap of ambiguous grief and grief’s radical transformation in our lives.
Books mentioned in this episode:
Soulbroken: A Guidebook for Your Journey Through Ambiguous Grief by Stephanie Sarazin
The Wild Edge of Sorrow: Rituals of Renewal and the Sacred Work of Grief by Francis Weller
Reregulated by Anna Runkle
Other books for Chronic Illness grief:
Check out Lauren’s work ( The Grief Circle)
