Post by Maureen Pollard, MSW, RSW

When we experience death, it is often perceived as one-dimensional. A person died. We are sad and we miss them. That is grief.
Grief is much more complex than this perspective suggests. When someone we love dies, there are multiple aspects to the loss that impact our grief journey.

Of course, we do miss the person who died. When we love someone and we know that they will be absent from the rest of our lives, it does make us sad. It also opens our broken hearts to myriad other feelings, depending on the relationship.
When someone in our life dies, we may also lose our status or role as created by that relationship. When our parents die, we become an orphan. When our spouse dies, we become a widow or widower. The death of a child is so powerful that there is no similar word to identify the new role a bereaved parent takes on. With or without a special term for the new status, our role often changes with the death of someone so intimately connected to us.

In addition to this shift in roles, we may also face the loss of our community. This is especially true if our regular daily interactions revolved around our role in relationship to the person who died. It’s also true if the death means we have to move or change our living circumstances in some other significant way.

These losses are often accompanied by the disruption of our hopes and dreams; the vision we held for the future. It can feel as if we were building a jigsaw puzzle, with the image of the life we desired coming together. The death acts to toss the entire puzzle into the air. As it lands we find we are missing some pieces and in fact, we no longer have the same image to work toward. We have unfamiliar pieces and no pretty picture to match them to.

Death takes many things from us. We may lose a sense of safety, and come to realize how little we control in the world around us. We may lose our innocence and grapple with our faith.

But as we find our way through grief, we may also make gains. We may find comfort and love from unexpected corners of our world. We may find grace and forgiveness as we learn to hold ourselves with compassion while we learn to carry the weight of our painful loss. We may come to know that we are much stronger than we once believed, even as we learn to hold hope and joy for life at the same time as we make space for the pain and heartache of grief.