You’re Not Crazy – You’re Grieving Pt. 6

Part 6: Living and Grieving Together

by Alan D. Wolfelt, Ph.D.

In the early days after the death of someone you love dearly, it’s normal for this step to seem like a ridiculous impossibility. You feel so raw and torn apart, you can’t imagine surviving, let alone returning to any semblance of “normal life.”

But then the first couple of weeks pass, the funeral has been held, and there it is—normal life, staring you in the face. How can it be? You’re still torn apart. You’re still immersed in shock and numbness. You’re still shattered—completely crazed by grief. But nonetheless, you have to keep getting out of bed and walking the dog and paying the bills and trying to eat. It’s crazy making.

Life, as they say, goes on. It seems unbelievable, but it does. Your inner world may have stopped, but the outer world has not. And even your own life—with all its daily needs and responsibilities— hasn’t stopped either. So here you are, living while grieving.

But now I want to talk about truly living while grieving. That is, not just surviving but engaging with each day in life-affirming ways even as you continue to grieve and mourn.

If you’re still in early survival mode, you may not be ready to reflect on the content of this article right now. If so, it is perfectly OK to come back to it at a later time. As with all things in grief, you and only you get to decide if and when you’re in a place to consider the ideas outlined here.

But if you feel like beginning to think about the longer term, let’s keep going.

Grief Is Forever

People often ask me how long grief lasts. The hard truth is that grief is forever. As long as you love the person who died, you will continue to grieve them. Because grief is love, grief doesn’t discretely end.

But thank goodness, grief does change over time. It softens. The intense early pain grows duller then eventually settles into the background—especially if you’ve been actively mourning along the way. Like a serious but healed wound on the body, it’s always there, but it no longer demands your daily (or hourly or minute-by-minute) attention. Nor does it hurt so much.

Love doesn’t end. It learns to live with the absence. I promise you, you will feel better. Your life will feel normal again, even though it will be a new normal.

Grief and Truly Living Can Coexist

You’ve already learned that you have no choice but to keep living after a significant loss. You live even as you grieve.

True, in the beginning, that living is merely surviving. One day at a time, one second at a time. But as you begin to integrate the absence of the person who died, over time and through active mourning, your survival mode can start to move toward a truly living mode.

For me, these are the signs of truly living:

- Stepping away from judgment, control, worry, and conflict

- Listening to your intuition

- Experiencing renewal in solitude

- Acknowledging the sacredness and privilege of being alive

- Being your best self

- Enjoying a sense of wellbeing

- Feeling at peace

- Giving and receiving love

- Feeling gratitude and appreciation

- Smiling and laugh

- Experiencing playfulness and levity

- Feeling a sense of meaning and purpose

- Feeling connected with other and the natural world

In other words, they are indicators of quality of life.

When you are feeling gratitude and appreciation, for example, you’re truly living. When you are giving and receiving love, you’re truly living. When you are enjoying a sense of wellbeing and feeling meaning and purpose, you’re truly living.

Truly living means being present to your life in ways that acknowledge the good and the beautiful. It means bringing your awareness to the opportunities for pleasure and joy that are available to you each day. It’s an intentional way of embracing the moments—be they hours, days, months, or years—that are ahead of you.

Everything Belongs

Of course, truly living also means being present to and fully engaging with the difficult experiences in life, including death and grief. Love and attachment are indeed wonderful, but the circumstances of life are impermanent. No matter how devotedly we love and try to safeguard our attachments, things change.

People get sick. People age. People die. Pets too. People betray us. We betray ourselves. Passions ebb and flow. Fortunes rise and fall. And no matter what happens, the world just keeps turning.

Change is actually more of a constant than any stability we may experience.

Even though I do in fact think we’re born to live and love, we can also get better at acknowledging that loss is also a big and unavoidable part of human life. Loss isn’t really crazy. It’s normal, too. Pretending that life is all roses isn’t truly living—it’s denial.

When bad things happen, there are three paths. One is denial. Another is permanent, all-pervasive grief and pessimism. And the third is experiencing and mourning the life losses even as you continue to truly live.

The human experience includes joys and hard work and challenges and heartbreaks in a crazy mixture. The third path is the one that acknowledges that everything belongs. Truly living means being open to and acknowledging all of it. While at the same time maintaining the belief that it’s a privilege to be on this earth for a short while and to continue to live and love every precious day.

Some people come to grief and think their life is over. They are so torn apart and in so much pain that they cannot imagine their life will ever be good again. The grief and darkness take over, and for a time there is little more than pain and sorrow.

The ideas in the previous articles in this series help you through this period. They help you survive your time of darkness. But eventually your grief work becomes developing the understanding that grieving and truly living are not mutually exclusive. You can do both at the same time.

Authentic Mourning Is Truly Living

Grief is love, and love is life. I’m sure you agree that love is essential to truly living. Well, the corollary is also true—truly grieving through active, open mourning is also essential to truly living.

In psychology there’s this concept called congruency. It means acting on the outside in alignment with how you feel on the inside. It means speaking and behaving in accordance with your true feelings and values.

Congruency is a really good thing to pay attention to because it helps you feel right with yourself. When you’re congruent, you’re living your truth. You’re being honest with yourself and others. You’re in harmony inside and out.

The opposite of congruency is disconnection and disharmony. When you feel one way and act another, it feels wrong. It is like you are two separate people, and the person on the outside isn’t doing the right thing. In fact, being incongruent makes a lot people feel crazy their whole life long.

So, being open and honest on the outside about your inner grief is foundational to truly living. In other words, for you, active, authentic mourning is now an inextricable part of truly living.

Seeking More Love, Meaning, Awe, and Joy Is Truly Living

While in early grief it’s normal and necessary to focus on the foundational-level needs of survival, in the longer run it’s not at all crazy for you to think that even as you’re grieving, you can also work on the higher-level experiences of love, meaning, awe, and joy.

Nurturing love can be accomplished with little things like:

getting together with a friend for coffee
sending a handwritten card to someone who is special to you
saying yes when someone invites you out for dinner
surprising someone with a gift
simply giving a genuine compliment

More broadly, connection with others grows with the building blocks of proximity—being in the same room together, repetition—spending time together frequently, and quality time—doing things together that allow you to have fun but also share things that matter. Don’t forget that talking about your loss with your loved ones is also part of nurturing love.

Adding more meaning to life is as simple as asking yourself, “What are some ways of spending time that feel meaningful to me?” Here are some self-care activities that can feel meaningful:

taking a walk outdoors
gardening
cooking
making art
taking a class
learning a new skill
volunteering
helping a neighbor or family member

And if you find meaning in certain loss-focused activities—such as volunteering for a cause related to the death or reaching out to someone else grieving the same loss—that counts, too.

I think building the feeling of awe and wonder into your routines takes a little more thought—but it’s more than worth it. Awe is that expansive feeling you get when you stand near the edge of the Grand Canyon, look at starry night sky, hold a newborn baby, or listen to an incredible musician. It’s almost unbelievable that the world contains such amazing things.

Studies show that awe-filled moments boost your mood, improve your physical health, help you think more critically, foster generosity, and help you feel more connected to other people and humanity. So thinking about what makes you feel awe and adding some awe to your daily routine—even if it’s through something as simple as spending time outdoors or watching YouTube nature videos—is a lovely way of improving your quality of life.

Finally, you need and deserve joy. It’s not uncommon for grieving people to experience some of what I refer to as the “joy-guilt” syndrome. This is where you have a moment of joy but then feel a twinge of guilt. “How can I be happy when they’re not here?” you might think. However, the real work at hand is allowing yourselves to continue to mourn while knowing that experiencing all emotions—including joy—is central to being human and finding continued meaning in life and living.

Closing Thoughts

After the death of someone loved, you aren’t crazy—you’re grieving. And you’re understandably shattered—which is crazy in the truest sense of the word.

It’s OK to feel crazy in grief. In fact, for people it can be empowering to own their crazy. Yes, it is painful to love and to lose. But at the same time, it’s also the greatest privilege I know of.

As I was wrapping up this article series, I realized that in English we also use the word “crazy” to mean love.

“I’m crazy about you,” we say.

Or: “I love ______ like crazy.”

In this sense, the people and things we go crazy for are our passions. They are what give our lives meaning and purpose.

When you are feeling crazy about something, it means you care about it deeply. This kind of crazy is how you know you are alive.

So, as you step toward truly living even as you grieve, I urge you to remember to honor and follow your crazy.

Grieve like crazy.

Mourn like crazy.

Love like crazy.

Live like crazy.

I hope we meet one day.