1EQQ8ZzGD

Bereavement and mourning
When should someone be finished
grieving?
Andy Johns, I lost a parent as a child
My mom died when I was ten years old. now I'm a twenty-nine-year-old
man. Having dealt with her loss for nearly
twenty years, I can tell you that grief does not go away. The intensity
of grief may change over time and the characteristics
of grief you experience change as well. Yet grief rooted in the
death of a loved one never goes away, and that is a good thing.
Grieving is not about making it end as quickly as possible.
Grieving is an essential human process and it should be embraced,
not ignored or expedited. As Steve Jobs said, "Death
is very likely the single greatest invention of life." It's life's
change-agent and you should think about grief as the environment
in which change happens. For example, read about
Dashrath Majhi. After the death of his wife, this man spent
twenty-two years single-handedly cutting a path through a
nearby mountain range so that other villagers could access
local medical help more easily. From the loss of his wife, this
man changed the lives of others. I'm sure that every time
he picked up his tools, he felt grief, yet he was transformed
through that process into a humanitarian.
My point isn't that everyone will respond in a similarly
monumental fashion. But death changes us, and grief is the
environment in which that change happens. With that being
said I would encourage you to ask the question differently.
Don't ask about how quickly you can end the grief. Instead
you should ask, "When can I start and what might I experience
along the way?"
If I were to describe the nature of grief I would describe
grief with these words: seasonal, imperceptible yet influential,
interminable.
Seasonal - from what I've experienced, I can say that grief
has a periodicity to it. The seasonality of grief during the
Holidays is a common example. For many people, the Holidays
means spending time with the people you love and that
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