Your husband is dead, perhaps one month, perhaps one year, perhaps one hundred years. Ask nine widows, Do you miss Him?, and you will hear nine yeses, regardless the length of time He is gone.

You betcha!

So what is a widow to do? It is not easy getting through the grief process, and knowing you must walk the grief journey alone is difficult at best. But I am here to tell you everything will be all right. You will get through your tunnel of grief, because I have 5 don’ts for you to remember when living life after burying Him.

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The death of a loved one is a shattering, life altering experience. The grief that follows can be disorienting and lonely.

As a friend of someone who’s grieving, you may feel totally ill equipped to respond to their loss. The result can be uncomfortable visits, or avoidance which just adds a whole new dimension of loss for the person who’s grieving.

Being supportive is actually quite easy, once you get past your own discomfort. All that’s really called for is an open heart, a willingness to be present, and the capacity to listen.

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When a parent passes away, a link to the past is lost; when a spouse passes away, a link to the present is gone; but when a child passes away, a link to the future is departed. An inescapable part of life is loss, and grief, a natural progression for healing. The parent-child relationship is physically, socially, and psychologically unique among all other human relationships. They must learn to rebuild their life without their beloved child. There are differences, as men in general are taught to be the rock, who can be leaned on by others and to look upto for support, which frequently causes men to submerge their own pain. Women, on the other hand, express emotions openly. Understanding the differences in how men and women grieve can help minimize the perception that one parent has suffered a greater loss than the other.

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In a culture such as ours, death is often viewed as a malevolent aberration rather than the normal and natural outcome of being alive. Don’t get me wrong, I’m all in favor of putting it off as long as possible, but the brutal fact is that we can’t put it off forever. Sooner or later we will make that passage as will all those we love.

As sobering as the fact of death is, even more sobering is the impact of our own denial on those left behind following the death of someone they love.

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Do you think grief and mourning are the same experience? Do you use the two terms interchangeably? In reality, most authorities on the grief process point out a very important and major difference between the two.

Grief is commonly defined as the process of experiencing a variety of physical, psychological, social, and behavioral reactions from some type of loss. Loss comes in two categories: psychosocial loss (divorce, death of a loved one, loss of meaning, etc.) and physical loss (wallet, body part, automobile, etc.). Looked at another way, we grieve changes of all types.

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My daughter had signed an organ donor card, but my husband and I did not know it. We learned about our daughter’s decision after she was severely injured in a car crash. Surgeons operated on her for 20 hours and could not save our daughter’s life. Finally, the supervising surgeon told us our daughter was brain dead. Did we want to proceed with organ donation?

I was already in shock. The thought of donating my daughter’s organs was another shock and I was worried sick about my 15-year-old twin grandchildren. They had just lost their mother — their best friend and protector — and we had lost our daughter. The surgeon described the organ harvesting procedure and, though I was an organ donor myself, I did not want to hear it.

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Have some of your thoughts related to the death of a loved one caused sleepless nights? Are negative thoughts, concerning how you will manage alone, increasing the pain of loss? Or, are you a chronic worrier, and the flood of thoughts at times is just unbearable?

If you can say yes to any of these questions it is critical to understand at the outset that you can find ways to reduce the effects of bothersome thoughts. Here’s how.

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I will always remember how cold it was that day; the bitter cold which cuts like a knife, unusually cold for December in Middle Tennessee. Most of the details of that day are etched into my memory like an epitaph carved in stone.

The sky was clear; the stars were bright before sunrise that morning. As I drove to work, I saw a shooting star blaze across the sky, disappearing as it shed its last light. (It’s funny the things we remember so clearly while other memories escape our grasp.)

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The death of a loved one is a shattering, life altering experience. The grief that follows can be disorienting and lonely.

As a friend of someone who’s grieving, you may feel totally ill equipped to respond to their loss. The result can be uncomfortable visits, or avoidance which just adds a whole new dimension of loss for the person who’s grieving.

Being supportive is actually quite easy, once you get past your own discomfort. All that’s really called for is an open heart, a willingness to be present, and the capacity to listen.

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Grieving is an act of love.
It begins when someone or something you love is lost, and the stronger the love the greater the grief. The act of grieving honors you and the significance of your loss.

The longer you live the more loss you experience. In order to grieve in healthy ways, you need to understand the stages of the grief process itself.

Shock.
This is the body/mind’s way of saving you from the devastating pain of the loss, at least initially. It is a blessing at best, but at worst can become a long-term numbness to feelings that resembles a sort of living death. It will pass naturally as long as the other components of the grief process are honored.

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