To those who mourn

This year, many in my circle of friends will be experiencing the "firsts"...first holidays after the death of one or more dear ones.

When I lost my father, husband and cat (all sudden and unexpected) within just a few months in 2001, and ended up moving several times and changing jobs, plus experienced 9/11 with the rest of the world, my life was a whirlwind of grief. On any given day, I was in several different stages of grief for each of those losses (and more). Some days, these feelings blended together into a big fat black cloud that blocked every ray of light.

Talk about confusing! I didn't know what stage of grief (shock, denial, bargaining, guilt, anger, depression, acceptance) I was supposed to be in. I couldn't tell if I was "making progress" or sinking. When I got to the point that I felt I was in danger of never recovering, I reached out for professional help.

The most important thing I learned from the therapist is that grief is a unique experience for human beings. Each person experiences grief differently, and each loss for that person is experienced differently. It's also unique in the sense that it doesn't follow a linear path like so much else in our lives.

Grief is a spiral. Picture a spiral staircase, only instead of it being the same width top to bottom, it gets wider as you take steps. Oh, and it goes both up and down (this is some whacky staircase).

At the beginning of your grief journey, you may experience the loss acutely every minute. You wake up thinking of your dear one. You feel like crying all the time. But then one day you realize you woke up and had breakfast and were on your way to work before you thought about it. A while later you are back to crying, but it's not all the time. Then a holiday or milestone hits and it seems like you are back to the first step.

You're not. You are on a different step, higher up and farther out from the center, with a bigger gap between episodes each time they come around. The first Christmas (birthday, anniversary or other milestone) is horrible, the second one awful, the third one not as bad, and so on. If you are walking up that spiral staircase, you're making progress.

But if you're walking down the staircase, you find that it ends in a dark circle. Your grief stages rotate and you experience them over and over again and the gaps between them never get wider. You're stuck. That's where I was when I reached out. The therapist helped turn me around, sending me back up that staircase.

I'm still on that staircase. I am on the step where I mostly smile when I think of Dad or Daniel (I'm pretty much over the loss of Stanley the cat). But I still wish they were here. Dad would be getting a kick out of giving the little ones Christmas gifts that their parents would not like (drum sets, trampolines). Daniel would eat too much and give me a lame gift (like the $2 bill I still carry in my wallet).

To my friends who mourn, know that you shall be comforted. Know that it will get better. Know that the pain you are feeling now is normal and healthy and will lessen in time, as long as you keep walking up. If you find yourself walking down, reach out. Help is available. Prayer, of course, can bring comfort. But God puts people in our lives to help too. People who write things like this.

And if you are already stuck in the dark at the bottom of the staircase, it's never to late to turn around. As long as there is life, there is hope of recovery.