Loss is often puzzling. You must understand your grief before you can reconcile your sorrow and misery. Clarity in your understanding enables you to stop grieving and start healing. So let’s create a word picture. In many ways grief can be likened to a sandstorm in the desert. Anyone who has experienced a sandstorm in the desert unmistakably understands what the storm does to your senses. Your senses need horizons, they need measurements, and they need guidelines by which to apply themselves. In the sand storm there are no horizons and no guidelines. There is no near or far, no low and high. There is only a moving wall of wind and sand that roars around you, overwhelming insane, shattering.
However, your terrible grief is not in the wind or the sand. It is the dread, the choking, struggling, and cowering panic brought on by the unbearable confusion, and the loss of prospective. Yoursensesare usually trustworthy; yet they demand prospective. Like the desert wind screams and roars as it piles up sand (having no respect for anything in its path), grief storms through your senses. You have feelings of insecurity and doubt. Many will share their advice, but all you can hear are the ways in which you feel they don’t understand your shattered life. You feel so alone. Like the desert after the storm, your situation feels uncomfortable, overwhelmingly difficult and without life and hope.
Why? Usually grief isn’t rooted in just one loss. For example, the loss of a spouse is more than the loss of your companion. It’s the loss of your best friend, your confidant, your protector, provider, the love of your life, your source of income, the one who maintains your car, your helper with domestic chores, the painter of your house and repairer of the broken screen, the second half of your moving-again-team, the meal creator, the activities coordinator, the enrichment initiator. It’s the one who cuts your hair and looks after your health, tends to the gifts for special events, the one who takes a house and makes it a home, the one who searches out needed truths with the tenacity of the FBI, the one who networks and causes things to happen that normally could never be… And so many losses all at once feels very much like a sandstorm in the desert.
Take heart. There is a way out of your storm. As you better understand the breadth and the width of your sorrow, there are important guidelines you should consider.
1) First and foremost, there is a greater power than you. We need to go to a quiet place and seek the comfort and inspiration from communication with God. He sees you. He knows you. He hasn’t forgotten you. Ask Him for help. Let Him bring you the type of comfort and hope that only He can bring. Ask Him to guide you.
2) Clearly you can't have your old life back. Can you accept a quiet resolution to make new a life of happiness again?
3) Expect and watch for opportunities for the new season you are in. Although it begins with you, the power of two can be greater than one. Seek companionship of others.
4) Tell your story; there is a lightening of the load in sharing the burden. Sometimes you find renewed energy through forgotten beauty in the telling.
5) If you lack strength or understanding, find professional help.
6) Recognize that walking through your grief is a journey, not a single act. Give yourself time but don't isolate from life.
7) Do your utmost to identify every possible path to heal your grief.
8) Grief almost always requires compromise. Find a middle ground that gives you hope and peace.
You can, you know, find the strength to move through your sandstorm of grief. I know.I’ve been there. Many times.
John T. Catrett, III Scissortail Hospice Chaplain 306 N. Main Street, Suite E Bristow, OK 74010 918.352.308