RETROSPECTIVE
Dealing with Grief: To Suffer or to Accept
Pain is inevitable. It takes many shapes and forms throughout our lives. It can be as small as a simple bruise when you accidentally bump your knee, or as big as a traumatic past that haunts our everyday life.
As long as we’re alive, the pain will always continue to seek its place in us. With that in mind, I’ve always thought that suffering would always come hand in hand with life. Such thought didn’t come out of nowhere, it was rooted in an ongoing trauma after I experienced a loss of a loved one.
Every year, there’s a period I call “the death blues”. It started in mid-July and ended around mid-August. Some events took place in this period, and they all had major impacts on me, one of them being my mom’s death anniversary.
Grief. Bereavement. For some time, I couldn’t process the uncontrollable, unpredictable, yet the most certain thing that would happen to any of us as human beings: death. I resisted the intense pain that came with the vacant position of my mother. I experienced long years of suffering that had put my studies and relationships with people at risk. I was barely functioning as the suffering had slowly eaten away my life, bit by bit.
There were times when the suffering was too much, and I didn’t even want to live for another day. Long story short, I decided to give therapy a shot and realized how skewed my view of the world was. Turns out, pain and suffering weren’t the only things that life had to offer.
The extreme tidal of “the death blues” finally began to change after I built up some courage to take a declaration of acceptance. I was fully conscious when I sat down beside my mom’s grave and told her, “From now on, I shall not grieve for you at the expense of myself and I will remember you fondly.”
The process of accepting grief would be different for each of us. It could be the loss of your pet, the friend you cherished thought would stay together forever, your grandparents used to spoil you, anyone, anything. It may take you weeks, months, years, or even decades to accept such loss. There’s no supposed duration for how long we “should” grieve. However, that doesn’t mean that all we can do is sit down and do nothing about it.
A psychology study was carried out among clients with prolonged grief disorder (PGD) and post-traumatic disorder (PTSD), which showed that through grief cognitive behavior therapy, the severity of the symptoms was greatly reduced (Komischke-Konnerup, 2023). The therapy included tasks that were helpful for the clients. From that therapy, there are a few practical things that I paid attention to:
- Confront the loss and the pain that goes with it by writing what life is like without the deceased or unexpressed anger connected to the loss.
- Identify and increase your engagement in more valuable and enjoyable activities to keep/regain confidence in yourself, other people, life, and the future.
- Try writing a letter to an imaginary friend who suffered a similar loss.
Although there are limitations to this practice, it’s still important to try such activities to “welcome” the pain that comes with loss.
What needs to be highlighted is that grief is not only there for us to resist or overcome, it is important for us to confront, experience, and walk through it, at our own pace as human beings.
Experiencing the grief of loved ones could be hard, especially when we’re alone. Therefore, we need others to help us cope with grief. An article by the American Psychology Association explained briefly about coping with the loss of our loved one. There are a few strategies to come to terms with grief such as: talking about the death of our loved one with our close friends, accepting our feelings (this could be done with the help of a psychologist or other mental health professional if we felt stuck), taking care of ourselves and our family, reaching out and helping others who’re going through something similar, and celebrating the life of our loved one who passed.
Aside from having a support system, I think it is important to find ways to express our grief. I found visual art very helpful for me to cope with grief. I created and admired paintings that manifest raw emotions of bereavement. I slowly face my loss and undefined emotions by watching them closely in the form of colorful, melancholic brushstrokes on canvases.
Lastly, acceptance in grief is finding a way to live with the loss while recognizing the love and memories that remain. It’s when we finally understand the fact that although the person we loved is no longer in our lives, their influence still shapes who we are. It is characterized by a feeling of tranquility. While acceptance doesn’t imply that the grieving process is finished, it does represent a change — a gentle recognition that even if life has changed irreversibly, it can still be joyful and meaningful.
Conclusion
Grief can manifest in waves, and it’s normal to feel a mix of emotions, including sadness, anger, and confusion. Through psychology, we can learn that healing comes from allowing ourselves to experience these emotions fully, understanding that they are a part of our human experience. Over time, with patience and support, the intense pain of grief can soften, making space for memories to bring more comfort than sorrow.
Overcoming grief is a deeply personal journey that varies for each individual, and in the psychological sense, it involves more than just the passage of time. Grief is a natural response to loss, and it is important to honor the pain rather than suppress it. Coping with grief can be done by having a good interaction with our support system and finding a way to express/confront emotions that come with grief.
It’s not about forgetting or “moving on,” but about integrating the loss into our lives in a way that allows us to find meaning and continue forward.
