Grief is a special life situation that does not require a solution. It is a life situation in which the door to the past has closed, but the door to the future is not yet open. The mourner is, as it were, ‘on the line’. In earlier times it was clear that someone was in mourning. White sheets hung over the windows and the mourners wore mourning bands. We no longer do that and this lack of visible signals for everyone does not always make it easier.
In addition, people in their ignorance can sometimes be very clumsy in their dealings with mourners. What I mean by this is that because we want to help the grieving person, we sometimes say the wrong things:
- after rain comes sunshine
- different times will come
- you have more children
Leave these kinds of comments aside, because they certainly don’t help. Grief is a process. The mourner must not get over the grief, the mourner must go through the grief. There is no other way and there is no easier way.
Mourning is not just sadness, mourners can experience total chaos, they can experience fear of life, they can experience fear of death, they can experience deep loneliness and an identity crisis. And that’s all normal and it’s all part of the process.
Mourning duties
To get through this process, the griever must perform grieving tasks:
- Accepting the reality of the loss
- Experiencing the pain of loss
- Adapting to the environment without the deceased
- Giving a new place to the deceased and learning to love life again
This can be a long road and it is not possible to make it a checklist with points to tick off.
Good completion
There are also features that let you know this process has been completed successfully:
- You feel good about life most of the time and you can enjoy everyday things again
- You can deal with life’s problems again
- You are less preoccupied with sadness
- The deceased can remain present in this life as a source of strength and inspiration
To help
If you want to help a grieving person, there are a number of things you should pay attention to.
- Abolish the word ‘must’. The grieving person doesn’t have to do anything, he or she looks for his or her own solutions and works them out.
- You help develop those solutions by asking questions.
- It can be terribly difficult for someone to go outside for the first time, so you can help if you offer to come along.
- What you can do is give the grieving person a massage, or if you can, Reiki, or nice oil to rub themselves with.
Don’t look for easy solutions, for example don’t advise going on holiday with a travel group, because mourners are not fun to be around, so there is little chance that this will be fun. No one who goes on holiday wants a mourner to come along.
If you are reading this article because you expect to enter a grieving process soon, I would like to point out a special opportunity. If you can afford it, call everyone personally after the funeral to make an appointment to say thank you personally. This gives you lots of opportunities to talk about it.
read more
- Mourning: the mistress or shadow widow