Good Grief!
I opine about joy and happiness a lot! Dealing with grief while still focusing on joy is difficult. Grief can come from many things, the most obvious being the loss of a loved one or pet. Grief can also result from losing your identity after forty years of your working life, losing children to adulthood or the empty nest syndrome, or even losing a dream due to financial or physical limitations such as losing a limb. Expecting grief and learning how to move through our grief is important, especially as we age.
Many of us who have gone through grief have heard an insensitive person mutter, "Just get over it" or "Move on." Grief isn't something to skip over. Grief must be felt, fully and consciously, so you can begin to heal. Think of it as an operation. If someone breaks an ankle and it requires surgery, like yours truly did in 2000, it freakin' hurts like heck. First came the pain and shock of the initial break. Then came the surgery, with more nuts and bolts than the aisles of Home Depot. Once the surgery was over, my pain changed from acute to intermittent and then finally subsided, but my ankle was altered forever. I had to rehabilitate my ankle with physical therapy, which was a new and different kind of pain, more of an ache. Then, finally, the healing, the new normal. My ankle was pain-free, but forever gone were the days of three-inch heels. I had to adjust to my new normal footwear. Grief is much the same when it attacks our mental health. We must expect the pain, honor the pain, and learn to focus on what we have gained from the person or thing we are grieving.
Focus on the positive things you experienced from the loss. Remember the good qualities of the person who has passed, celebrate the sense of accomplishment you received in your work years, and appreciate the reason or season of the relationship that has ended. There is always a positive that is born from the negative. This is the law of polarity. The law of polarity is the principle that everything has two "poles": good and evil, love and hate, attraction and disconnection. Think of the North and South Poles on a globe or a battery with its negative and positive terminals. Everything in the universe has an opposite.
It is up to us to do the digging for the gold.
Kahlil Gibran, a Lebanese poet, in his work "Joy and Sorrow," suggests that the depth of one's sorrow determines the capacity for joy and that the pain of loss can ultimately lead to profound happiness. Or cannot exist without some amount of sorrow, and vice versa. The relationship between these emotions is always in flux, each one growing while the other decreases. However, a person cannot feel one without incurring the other.
Grief can be good. Grief can lead to greater joy. Grief is necessary and unavoidable so let us make friends with grief and use its power to our advantage.
