This is a post on grief.  Sooner or later we all encounter grief if we live long enough.  Some people might say that all they know is grief.  But this is the sort of grief that most people are exposed to in our society and culture.

Grieving (and healing) very often involves pain.  In fact, it’s the emotional pain that you feel that may indicate that there is a problem in the first place.  Healing is also often best if it progresses from the “inside out.”  A few examples will suffice:

I was involved in helping people heal from physical ailments when I worked as a medic in the U.S. Air Force.  I remember patients who had abscesses.  Their lesion might be an abscess under the skin, in the abdomen, on the patient’s tailbone (a pilonidal cyst) or from a tissue pocket in the lining of their colon (diverticulitis.) I also had a few patients with appendicitis.  With the exception of sterile abscesses, a typical abscess is a pus-filled pocket develops following an infection or an injury.  If the pocket is small enough, and depending on what type of abscess it is, and where it is located, a regimen of antibiotics might be sufficient to resolve it.  In some cases, however, the doctor will ask for an I & D pack, which is used to make an incision into the skin for the purpose of draining the abscess.  In other cases, general surgery is required.

Another example of pain in healing that I was involved with has to do with second- and third-degree burns.  I’ve had to debride patients with serious burns on their arms, legs or trunk.  One minute you are picking off dead skin with forceps while another minute you are using a scrub sponge that looks like the black pumice bricks cooks use to clean grills in restaurants.  Here, you gently scrub the dead (necrotic) tissue until the wound bleeds.  In days past, maggots were used therapeutically in hospitals to clean wounds, though they were not in our formulary.  To control pain, the patient is given a healthy dose of morphine or ketamine twenty minutes before the procedure begins, but in my experience, what they get for pain is never nearly enough and not every nurse or technician is suited to inflict such therapeutic pain on a person.

Speaking of pain, C.S. Lewis in his book “Voyage of the Dawntredder” mentions a disobedient little boy named Eustace Scrubb who ignored the warning of Aslan the Lion to not take any treasure he might find on the fictional island the Pevensie children landed on. But Eustace put a gold bracelet on his arm nonetheless before falling into a deep sleep. When he awoke, he had turned into a dragon, with an arm that was now sorely pinched by the bracelet. Aslan appeared, Eustace apologized profusely, Aslan forgave him, but the ring remained tightly fixed around his arm which was now a leg on the dragon. The only way Aslan could remove the ring was to cut if off at great pain to Eustace. But in the end, Eustace became free.

More to grieving, I’ve thought of an onion (see featured photo.)  Like many other types of pain, the roots of the problem run deep in grief.  This is particularly true of people who have buried memories from their past that require surfacing in order for healing to progress.  So, I’ve taken a photo of an onion and a photo of a nasty looking melanoma and buried the melanoma in the deepest part of the onion.  The only way that the deadly lesion or, in the case of psychological problems, memory can be accessed is by peeling off the layers of healthy onion tissue which surround it.  There is no short cut to this.  It takes time, and it comes at the expense of healthy tissue.  The assumption in this case is that once the cancer is removed, the onion can regenerate, but of course, this species does of Allium does not.

I was engaged when I was just coming out of my teenage years.  When my wife died, I was only months away from turning seventy.  You don’t know any other life in that situation.  You are seen as vulnerable and some people avoid you. On the other hand, I also found a number of ladies who appeared to “hit on me.”  Perhaps it was just because I was available.  Perhaps they wrongly thought I was about to receive a hefty life insurance settlement.  Without a regular routine, one tends to freewheel.  You watch television late at night and run up the phone bill.  Or, you just let yourself go.  But you may find your familiar world to be terra incognita, on a voyage in uncharted seas where you are warned “here be dragons.”

Regardless of how you feel about your spouse, an estranged parent or child, your sibling, or someone unrelated whom you may have despised, you should expect to feel loss when they die.  The world will go on, but your world will have changed.  It may have changed for the better, but you cannot always know that when you are grieving.  When my wife died, I used my grief as if it were a warm cloak on a winter’s day.  For months I wondered where I would ever be able to give it up.  I felt like Schroeder in the “Peanuts” cartoon series with his security blanket.  So, grief was a shield or sorts.  But it could also be used as a sword to strike at someone, too.  It could be exploited.  You could exploit others that way.  You might be able to get “to the front of the line” without waiting your turn, or get someone to do something they might not ordinarily do because of your grief (if you were the manipulative sort.)

I’ve found some specific steps helpful to me in coming to grips with my grief.  The first is to have a regular routine.

Having a regular routine

I would visit my wife’s grave twice a day (she was buried only a mile or two from our house, so it was convenient.)  I’d share any news with her each visit, what the grandchildren were up to.  Sometimes my second visit was after dark.  Eventually I caught myself playing Aragorn and Arwen (Enya) in my car while sitting in the dark only feet from her where she lie.  It was around then that I first noticed the clouds of melancholy gathering overhead.

 So, as much as possible, I committed myself to being active.  I thought of playing the grieving widower for the rest of my life, which to me was something of a tragic or heroic figure, but a visit to the ER and a night in the hospital with a diagnosis of “accelerated hypertension” convinced me that assuming such a role might be short-lived at best.  I reached the conclusion that while some people may be “called” to live a life on their own, God’s “normal” purpose is for people to have families, and for a husband to have a wife.  This did not come with any disrespect or expense to my late wife who I still love and hope to encounter in the next life.

Be open about your feelings

Some authorities mention this as an important step in recovery.  I never had a feeling being open with others, perhaps too open.  I would wonder if I wasn’t just “playing a tape” sometimes.

Reframe your way of thinking

According to Prevention, reframing your way of thinking is beneficial as well.

One thing that goes hand-in-hand with grief are triggers. They can be something as innocuous as a particular smell or something more monumental like a major life event. One way to handle the often-unexpected wave of emotions is to simply feel them, really take note of them, then adjust.”

I was very well aware of triggers.  I could see teenagers and middle-aged couples holding hands and that wouldn’t bother me.  But when someone I perceived to be approximately my age spoke of grief, loss or loneliness, a flood of tears and a chorus of sobs would follow.  I went through the thirteen-week program known as Grief Share and found it to be very worthwhile.  But it was very intense.  On the first night I attended, there was a guy around thirty sitting next to me.  He cried nonstop after telling us that his wife died unexpectedly only two weeks earlier.  After twenty minutes of his lament, he was taken into another room by a counselor.  We (about thirty of us) were told he was not ready for the program because his loss was too recent.  The next person who spoke up (also a man) was probably in his late forties.  He mentioned how when he was twelve years old, he accidentally shot and killed his younger brother.  They were trying to cross a barbed-wire fence and the trigger of his rifle caught on one of the barbs (or something like that.)  In rural America (specifically Texas), it is not unusual for a twelve-year-old to have a .22 caliber rifle.  But he had never spoken about this and he, too, was stricken, though apparently not as profoundly as the previous person.  Overall, there was a cathartic effect to the evening, however.  Eventually, I brought my granddaughter with me to the Sunday evening sessions.  She had just gotten her learner’s permit to drive, and the seminars were fifty miles from home, so I was able to tempt her into coming by letting her practice her driving to and from the sessions.  The folks at the workshop were thrilled to have her.  They never had a teenager before, and my granddaughter shared what the loss of my wife meant to her.

Focus on your core values

It only makes sense to focus on your core values.  They have served you well for all of your life up to now.  You are what you are, and there should normally not be a radical shift in what you believe or how you approach life.  But I know people whose careers and very lives were destroyed by grief.  They died only months following a family members death.

Seek help PRN

We may need professional help and not even know it.  After my night in the hospital and after the hospitalist quizzed me closely about what was happening in my life before he discharged me, he told me that he thought my grief was the cause of my high blood pressure.  Instead of increasing the dose of my blood pressure medicine, he prescribed an antidepressant for me, and my blood pressure returned to normal.  This oblivious behavior on my part is common to people who are depressed.  They don’t have the ego resources to even think clearly sometimes, yet alone deal with life in general.  I was mostly retired by then, but still had classes to meet on a part time basis.

They say not to make any serious decisions until a year after the death of a spouse.  But did I let that stop me?  Nooo.  Six months after my wife died, I bought a new car and eleven months later I remarried.  My marriage is great six years later, though I traded the new car for something else.

When you are grieving, your faith is more important to you then ever.  My pastor coaxed me into teaching a Sunday School course on grief, which to me was like asking an alcoholic to teach about sobriety.  I just had not mastered the steps yet.  For example, I didn’t know what the first Christmas would be like as a widower.  But when I met Deena, the first emotion I felt was joy.  And I owe her a tremendous debt for taking a chance on me. And I still haven’t learned what Christmas would be like absent someone you love dearly.