Think back over the past year. Were there times in the last 12 months that you just felt off and couldn’t quite put your finger on what you were feeling or why? Maybe it felt like sadness or it felt like anger or frustration, but it was just a dull feeling that you were barely aware of if you were aware of it at all. I would venture to guess that most, if not all, of us have felt this way at different times in our lives. After some time passes, the feeling may fade, but eventually it comes back. So what is it? What is this dull feeling that something is off that sometimes feels like sadness and sometimes like anger, and sometimes feels like some combination of things?
There are probably several names we could attach to this feeling. We could think of it as “melancholy” (or melancholia), as some ancient people thought of it as. Melancholia was thought of as a feeling of sadness with no real cause. But what many of us feel is more than just sadness. It can feel like sadness, anger, anxiety, or just a dull apathy.
One appropriate name for this emotional experience is grief. We usually think of grief in relation to big losses, like when a loved one dies. But grief is what we experience whenever we experience any change in life and lose something in the process. Think about changing jobs. Even if you leave for a better situation, there was most likely something you left that was positive and meaningful. You feel a tinge of sadness about leaving, that is grief. As parents watch their children grow up, they miss stages of growth that have passed and are anxious about new stages of development. This experience is grief over what has been lost and facing unknowns of the future. These are the same feelings we have when someone we love dies. We miss having them with us, we think fondly of the good memories we have of them, and we don’t understand what life will be like without them.
Grief is something that we experience most of the time. There is always something changing and leading to some loss that leads to some amount of grief. Most of the time it is a minimal experience of grief that we barely notice. Other times it may feel overwhelming. Sometimes, like this past year for many people, it may be an extended experience of the minimal type of grief that seems to grow and grow. It helps us to name this experience and call it grief. It helps us to cope with it when we can relate it to other experiences when we knew we were grieving a loss.
Over the next few weeks I hope to offer some reflections on grief and ways we can cope with our own grief and how we can help our children with their experience of grief.
