What Does the “Other Side” of Grief Look Like?
Photo by Greg Becker on Unsplash.
When someone near to us dies, people often say to give it time and talk about how we’ll get over it eventually. But is there ever really any “getting over” the death of someone we love?
Well, of course not. There is no fixing it, and there is no making it better. The grief only goes away when the person we love comes back to life. Since that doesn’t happen, there is no end to our grief.
The reality is that the grief and the pain and the loss always stay with us. We will always miss them. There will always be moments when we feel like we’ve taken a punch to the gut when a grief burst hits us out of nowhere, but in general, grief does eventually stop being as sharply painful the way it was in the beginning.
Grief sticks with you on holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, death days…it’s still all there. It’s there when it’s expected—at all the major milestones, at the birth of a child they’ll never get to meet, at the wedding they couldn’t attend—all of it. It’s also there in the quiet, unexpected moments. Those sneak attacks are often more difficult to experience. The grief pops up when we hear certain songs, smell familiar scents, visit particular locations, watch certain movies…the list goes on. The memories of our person are all around us as is their absence. It’s never forgotten. It never leaves.
So, what does “the other side” look like, then? If grief is forever, where is the comfort? When does it get “better”? Grief may not ever fully go away, but it does change over time.
New grief is overwhelming and right at the surface. It’s a bruise that hurts with the slightest pressure. Later, it decreases in frequency and severity. It no longer overshadows every moment of one’s life. It’s more like an old injury that acts up every once in a while. It doesn’t hinder us from living everyday life, but it does remind us that we never healed 100%. With that also comes the ability to remember with joy and not sorrow.
In the earliest, hardest days of grief thinking about our person makes us sad because we know they have been taken from us. Later, those memories bring us comfort because it helps us feel as if they are still there. “Moving on” means that we are able to cope with the loss over time. We find ways to remember people and to continue to incorporate them into our lives.
There’s no going back to the way it was. There is before death and after death. We can never be the person we were before our loved one died, but there is a time when we emerge from the fog of fresh grief, and we become an altered version of ourselves. We forge a new path while carrying the best of our person with us.
Without going too heavily into grief theory, Dr. Lois Tonkins, a bereavement counsellor, developed a theory of grief in the 1990s that I love.
Rather than thinking of our grief as something that gets smaller over time, Dr. Tonkins presented the idea that our life simply continues to grow around our grief.
It’s still there, but it doesn’t take up as much space as it once did. A website I highly recommend to anyone who is grieving, who supports those grieving, or who just wants to learn more about grief in general, is What’s Your Grief. They’ve outlined several depictions of how Tonkin’s idea has been represented visually, which you can view here.