Tag Archives: healing grief

The final stage of the grief process isn’t what I imagined it would be

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I’ve written about the different stages of grief many times during my own journey through it. I became all too well acquainted with each of those stages during the last seventeen months. I bounced around the stages a lot and the process wasn’t at all a linear one like I thought it would be.

Some of the stages were harder than others. One of the stages I struggled with the most was the lesser known stage of jealousy. I’m ashamed to admit how many times I’d look at other couples and feel the jealousy rise up inside me because they had what I didn’t have anymore. It was so unfair. I won’t lie; I still feel that way sometimes but thankfully not as often as I did before.

I did a lot of inner work moving through the stages of grief and I do mean a lot. In some ways that work was just as hard as letting Kenny go the day he died. Some days I’d make good progress while others I backslid so far I felt like I was back at the beginning again. I think that backsliding was probably the worst as you feel like you had come so far only to have that progress ripped away from you. It was like you were being taunted by something you couldn’t see but could most certainly feel.

The further through the grieving process I got the easier it was for me to look in the proverbial rearview mirror and see that I really was making progress and not just backsliding all the time. I began to finally see the final stage of grief whereas before I didn’t think I’d ever get to it. That stage seemed unattainable for a long time.

Acceptance is that final stage of the grief process. Though I reached the stage of accepting the fact that Kenny was dead and never coming back a long time ago, it wasn’t until recently that I truly understood what the full meaning of the acceptance stage was. It encompassed much more than simply accepting that he died.

I came to understand that the final stage of acceptance had deeper levels to it than most people would think. It’s the acceptance of many different things, not just that your loved one died. This stage has more than one level to it, and truthfully, I’ve never heard or read anyone else say what I’m writing here.

It’s the acceptance that your whole entire life will never again be what it used to be. Every experience you have going forward will be nothing like it would have been before because you’ll be experiencing those things without them here.

It’s the acceptance that you have to adjust your way of life and the way you do everything. You don’t have that other person to consider in the decisions you have to make because whatever you choose to do won’t affect them like it would have when they were alive.

It’s the acceptance that you must go on with your life even though it’s not the life you thought you would have. The plans you once had will have to be adjusted. You can choose other plans, maybe ones you wouldn’t have chosen before.

It’s the acceptance that you can do things on your own terms and in your own time. You can either do something, or not. It’s solely up to you because you’re only accountable to yourself.

It’s the acceptance that you have the right to be happy after experiencing the worst thing that ever happened to you in your life. You’re not dead; your loved one is, and they would want you to be happy. They wouldn’t want you to live in a perpetual state of grief and despair for the rest of your life. They would want you to feel joy and happiness and everything else that goes along with it again.

It’s the acceptance that your loved one would want you to one day love someone else the way you loved them when they were here. It’s accepting that this is what they would want for you because your ability to love didn’t die with them. It’s you being able to accept another person into your life to fill the empty space left behind by your loved one’s death. It’s you accepting that you’re worthy of being loved by someone else other than the person you lost.

The final stage of the grief process isn’t at all what I imagined it would be. It’s really accepting that you have permission to live again where you thought before that was something you could never do again after your loved one died. It’s accepting that you’re still alive and have so much more living to do. It’s accepting that you can and will be happy again.

In order to put yourself back together again, you have to let your grief break you apart

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It’s been just over 16 months since Kenny died. I spent most of that time in a deep pit of grief and despair over his sudden and very unexpected death. It was an ugly place to exist inside of, and I’d never wish that on any other person, not ever. At the first anniversary of his death, I made the decision to not unpack my bags and live in that place for the rest of my life. I just could not do it. I decided to move onto a place of full acceptance that he was gone and to go forward living my life the best that I could and be as happy as I was able to be.

I’ve spent these last four months in heavy introspection of the twelve months prior to that. I haven’t even written any blog posts during this time as I’ve been busy dissecting and analyzing every bit of this journey through the grief process. Some things were obvious to me, right from the beginning, but one thing did not become crystal clear to me until just recently. That realization was this; that in order to put myself back together again, I had to let my grief break me apart.

As much as I tried to resist that breaking apart, in the end I had no choice but to allow it. I had to completely surrender to that breaking apart to be able to start putting myself back together again. I learned that the reassembling of myself would be different from the me that I was before I traveled through the grief process. The old me died the same day that Kenny did, and there was no resurrecting her. How could I ever really be the same again? It just wasn’t possible as Kenny took parts of me that belonged only to him when he died and there’s no way to retrieve them. Those lost parts of me live eternally with him, up in the clouds in Heaven.

In putting myself back together I discovered there were new pieces that emerged from the journey I had taken. I picked up those new pieces as I traveled along that dark path. At first those pieces were grabbed ahold of by my bloodied fingers as I crawled along, inch by inch, desperately trying to find my way forward without the person I didn’t know how to live without. I feel like the majority of my new pieces came during that time I was on my hands and knees on what felt like an uphill road paved with broken glass.

In time I was finally able to rise up and walk again, but not without the deep scars left behind by the slow, painful crawl. As time went by the broken glass didn’t hurt as bad as it did before because I had made some peace with its existence. It wasn’t until I was able to stand up that I could see that there was a tiny light off in the distance, one that I couldn’t see while crawling on the ground.

During these last four months of looking back at my journey, I saw that the new pieces of me I picked up replaced some of the pieces I lost. They didn’t fit exactly like the old pieces did, but they aren’t supposed to as they aren’t the same by any means. In the process of merging the new pieces of me with the old I had to find a way to bind them together into a new whole.

In Japan there is an ancient form of art called Kintsugi where broken pottery is repaired with gold and transformed into a new work of art. Each broken piece is visible because of the veins of gold running throughout the pottery. The gold fuses the broken pieces together and makes them one strong piece again, whereas before the shattered pieces were weak.

The practice of Kintsugi shows us that something broken can be put back together again, even if the pieces aren’t all there. It shows us too that the new pieces that fill in the parts that were lost can make it even more beautiful than before. Kintsugi teaches us that there is still value in something even if it’s broken. We just have to want to make the repair.

My takeaway in these last four months is that the me that was shattered into a million tiny pieces when Kenny died was able to be put back together again, but in a different form than before. But in order to do so I had to first allow myself to be completely broken apart by my grief. I then took all the broken and fragile pieces and wove them together with the new pieces of me I collected on my journey. The result was the birth of the new me where the scars from the breaking apart are what holds me together.