There is no recipe for how to go through grief. It is deeply personal and each loss is uniquely its own. There is no comparison. There is no worse or less bad or not-quite-so-devastating. There is no point in comparing at all. It’s grief and it’s each person’s grief to experience, feel, and carry.
I am not an expert on grief. I simply want to share my personal experience with it as this experience has profoundly changed my life and the way I look at the world. And the more I read about grief or listen to people talk about their own experience with grief, I know this is true for everyone. There is no going back. There is no getting rid of it. There is only going forward with it.
What fascinates me about grief is the fact that it is a universal experience that no one is spared from and connects all of us, and yet somehow as people in our society, we feel so awkward and somehow helpless around it.
The other day I read somewhere that “Our culture has a strange obsession with trying to force people out of pain that is rightfully theirs to feel.” Isn’t this the truth?
We have a problem letting things be. We want to make things better. We want to come up with a fast solution. We are trying to distract and numb and cover up. We are so good at this. But we are not very good at letting pain be pain, letting grief be grief, living through it, and living with it. And because of this, I think we miss out on what I believe is one of the most important lessons to learn from experiencing grief, that pain and suffering rarely come without beauty and love, that beauty and love rarely come without pain and suffering, and that both can and do coexist in this world and in each of our lives. And that this reality is a mystery and not something we have logical and rational explanations for, but ultimately gives our lives deeper meaning and a more satisfying purpose.
About 2 months after my brother’s funeral, I stared at the pregnancy stick test, feeling all the butterflies in my stomach while knowing deep down that the positive sign would appear any second now. It did, and I burst into tears. That is not how I imagined my reaction to being pregnant with my first child. I always wanted to be a mother, but I couldn’t stop crying for a very long time. This was obviously hard to take for my husband who was visibly excited and overjoyed, but who also understood why I was crying. He understood, while at the same time being saddened by the fact that this wasn’t exactly the joyous moment that he had thought it would be for us. I was still in the midst of grieving. I was still too sad to be happy. I was still trying to figure out how to live with loss. How could I possibly also learn how to live in a world
with a new life? I couldn’t make sense of it. It seemed too soon.
‘I will tell my parents’, I said to my husband, ‘but I can’t tell anyone else yet. I can’t bear the thought of everyone being excited for us. I can’t bear their reactions.’ He understood, but I also could see some disappointment. He, of course, wanted to tell his family, but I begged him to wait, and he respected that.
As days went on, I, of course, also felt excitement in me. It was undeniable that a baby would bring some much needed joy into our families. But I think I was afraid that everyone else would forget about my grief. I was afraid that everyone else would be afraid to acknowledge my brother’s life while welcoming a new life. I was afraid that people would forget to acknowledge the pain I was in while watching my belly grow. I was afraid that people would talk about being thankful for this new life while ignoring the loss of another life. It was a confusing mess of mixed emotions and no one could fix it for me. I had to live through it. I was scared to be happy, and I was scared to be sad. I felt guilty about being excited and guilty about being sad. I didn’t know how to live both.
Looking back, I still don’t think I have a solution or formula for such a confusing time. All I know is that things changed over time. I slowly, very slowly learned to live with both. I slowly learned to carry the love and excitement for my first born son, while still mourning the loss of my brother. The birth of my son didn’t take away the grief; it added something new to my life that I now had to learn to navigate as well. My first born son is one of the greatest gifts of my life, but the hole that my brother left remains.
Years later, my son himself affirmed this juxtaposition, that it was okay for both to exist simultaneously, when I told him stories about my brother and we looked at photographs of him: ‘ I wish I could have met him. We barely missed each other. I wish our lives had overlapped only for a little while.’
’Yes, me too.‘
Our broken hearts are capable of so much more than we think. Our capacity for love can increase so much when we live through the pain of a loss. Let’s not push one away to make room for the other. Let’s learn to hold both.
Thank you for reading! As always, feel free to share this post and let me know your thoughts in the comment section.
If you missed the first or second part, you can read them by clicking below. “Finding Beauty After Loss” will continue in two weeks when I talk about the importance and beauty of memories, rituals, and the one and probably only advice I would give to someone who has a bereaved person in their life.
Part 1 and Part 2
Finding Beauty After Loss
This is the second part of a series titled “Finding Beauty After Loss”, reflections on my personal experience with grief. You can read the first part here. My brother wasn’t supposed to die. He didn’t want to die. He looked forward to more travel, starting a family, and so much more. My brother loved children, and children loved him. I would have loved …
So beautifully articulated, Manuela. Thank you for sharing! Joy, sadness, and beauty carries through your photographs. Thats why I love your work. They come from a deep place within. Your story makes it all meaningful.
Through pain and suffering we can see experience Gods love and faithfulness. We strive for a pain-free life but only through pain can we feel such deep love and true joy. I am grateful that you are willing to share these deep and personal insights with us!! We all have or will have times of grief and its so good to share it openly with others and not try to cover it up. Grief and love do coincide together as long as we open our hearts to feel both. Blessings.