One of the more confusing things about grief is that people often expect it to behave like an illness.
You become unwell.
You recover.
Life returns to normal.
At least, that's how we're used to thinking about difficult experiences.
Grief doesn't always cooperate.
Someone dies. A relationship ends. A future you expected disappears.
And after a while, a question begins to creep in.
Sometimes from other people.
Sometimes from ourselves.
Shouldn't I be feeling better by now?
It's a reasonable question.
The trouble is that grief rarely seems particularly interested in our timetable.
And having spent a considerable amount of time sitting alongside people who are grieving, I've come to wonder whether the question itself might be creating part of the difficulty.
When Does Everyone Else Think Grief Should End?
Nobody sends out guidance suggesting that the appropriate period for grieving is six months, twelve months or three and a half years.
And yet most of us seem to carry some idea of what feels reasonable.
Immediately after a loss, people often understand.
They ask how we're doing. They make allowances. They recognise that something significant has happened.
As time passes, things become less clear.
The messages are rarely unkind. Often they're quite the opposite.
You seem more like yourself.
At least they're not suffering anymore.
You have to move on.
Time heals.
Sometimes nobody says anything at all.
The messages become less frequent. People stop asking. Life returns to something resembling normality for everyone else.
Except, of course, that normality may no longer exist for the person who is grieving.
I've sat alongside people who describe feeling as though the world has moved on without them. Everyone else appears to have returned to their lives while they're still trying to understand what has happened to theirs.
And gradually, something else begins to happen.
They start questioning themselves.
Why am I still feeling like this?
Why can't I get over it?
What's wrong with me?
What began as grief can become grief accompanied by the feeling that we're somehow doing it badly.
Whose Timetable Are We Following?
When I first began working with grief, I thought I needed to be doing something.
Helping people move forward. Making progress. Finding ways to make things feel better.
I remember taking some of that frustration into supervision.
I was worried that I wasn't doing enough.
My supervisor, Lorraine, asked me a question that has stayed with me.
Whose pace are you working to?
It's a deceptively simple question.
Because sometimes the urgency to make progress belongs to the person supporting someone, rather than the person who is grieving.
We want to see people feeling better. We want to believe that what we're doing is helping. We want to see movement.
Families and friends may want reassurance that somebody they love is going to be alright.
And the person who is grieving may desperately want relief from what they're experiencing.
None of those wishes is unreasonable.
But somewhere along the way, we can begin measuring grief against expectations that nobody consciously agreed to.
I've become much more comfortable with the idea that grief doesn't have to demonstrate progress every week.
Someone might spend one session talking about the person they've lost and another talking about work, the children or what they're having for tea.
They might laugh.
They might cry.
They might have a good week followed by a particularly difficult Tuesday.
That doesn't necessarily mean they've gone backwards.
It might simply mean that grief doesn't move in the straight line we imagined it would.
What Exactly Are We Expecting to Disappear?
This is where I think grief becomes particularly difficult to measure.
What does recovery actually mean?
Does it mean never feeling sad?
Never missing somebody?
Never thinking about them unexpectedly?
If that's the standard, I suspect a great many people will spend their lives believing they haven't recovered.
A song comes on the radio.
A photograph appears.
A particular smell catches your attention.
An ordinary Tuesday suddenly becomes less ordinary.
Sometimes it's reaching for the phone before remembering there won't be an answer.
Sometimes it's hearing yourself use an expression that belonged to somebody else.
I think we underestimate how deeply people become woven into the ordinary fabric of our lives.
And perhaps we underestimate how long those connections remain.
Years can pass and a memory can still catch us completely off guard.
But does that mean we're stuck?
Does it mean the intervening years haven't mattered?
Or does it simply mean that somebody who was important to us remains important?
There is a difference.
Carrying Grief Is Different From Being Stuck
I use metaphors quite often in my work. Not because I think there's a perfect image for grief, but because sometimes an image helps us find words for something that's difficult to describe.
One I return to is that of a heavy black medicine ball.
Imagine that when somebody dies, you're handed this enormous weight.
At first, it takes both hands to carry it. You can't put it down. You can't do much else because so much of your energy is taken up simply holding it.
As time passes, something begins to change.
Perhaps you become stronger. Perhaps you find a different way of holding it.
You might rest it against your hip for a while. Eventually, you might manage to put it into a backpack.
It's still there.
You haven't thrown it away.
You haven't forgotten about it.
And occasionally, you might find yourself carrying its full weight again.
But you've learned that you can carry it while doing other things.
I like this image because it doesn't ask somebody to get rid of their grief.
It simply offers the possibility that the way we carry something can change.
Of course, there are times when grief becomes so overwhelming that it feels impossible to carry anything else. When that happens, finding some support can make an important difference.
But the length of time somebody has been grieving doesn't necessarily tell us how they're managing.
And sometimes the question isn't how long somebody has been grieving, but how much room grief is leaving for the rest of their life.
Perhaps that's a more useful thing to explore than whether somebody should be over it by now.
Can You Be Happy and Still Be Grieving?
One of the things I've learned through this work is that grief and happiness aren't necessarily opposites.
People sometimes feel guilty when they laugh.
They enjoy a day out and then wonder whether they should have.
They begin a new relationship and worry about what that means for the person they've lost.
They notice they've gone an entire afternoon without thinking about their bereavement.
And instead of feeling relieved, they feel guilty.
As though feeling better somehow means loving less.
It's an interesting contradiction.
We worry when we're still grieving because we think we should be feeling better.
And sometimes, when we do feel better, we worry that we shouldn't.
It can become quite difficult to know what we're supposed to feel.
Perhaps that's because we're still trying to measure something that doesn't lend itself particularly well to measurement.
Missing somebody and living your life aren't mutually exclusive.
We can remember somebody with sadness and still look forward to tomorrow.
We can laugh without forgetting.
We can enjoy something new without diminishing what came before.
And perhaps we don't need to decide which of those feelings is the correct one.
Perhaps the Better Question
How long is grief supposed to last?
I don't know that there's a useful universal answer.
I've sat alongside people whose losses happened days earlier and others who are still making sense of something that happened decades ago.
What I've learned is that the passage of time tells us surprisingly little about what a relationship meant or how somebody is living with its absence.
And I wonder whether we sometimes make grief harder by treating it as something we're supposed to finish.
We measure how long it's been.
We compare ourselves with other people.
We wonder whether we're where we should be.
But where exactly is that?
Perhaps the more helpful question isn't:
How long should this last?
Perhaps it's:
How am I living with it?
Not because grief should be easy.
Not because every loss must eventually make sense.
And certainly not because we have to find something positive in what has happened.
But because grief isn't always something we finish.
Sometimes it's something we learn to carry differently.
And perhaps that isn't evidence that we've failed to move on.
Perhaps it's evidence that something mattered enough to leave a mark.
