When we ignore our grief, when we distract ourselves or refuse to acknowledge it, the invisible pain of these actions create havoc worse than facing it in the first place.  At least that’s what the experts tell us.

My therapist drew a dot, in the middle of a piece of paper.  She said this is your grief, the first moment your grief arrived.  As she said this she kept pen on paper continuing to press in the shape of the dot until it bore a hole through the paper.  I liked her analogy.  Yes, my grief has ripped a hole in my being.

Then she drew a small circle from this centre, explaining this is time, the days that go on.  She said; “when something happens, a memory or just breathing, you are drawn back to the centre”.  She drew the line back to the dot. She continued drawing circles around the dot, each circle of time extending a little further away from the dot but with lines going back to the dot.  This illustrated that triggers never quit but, with time, it takes longer for the line from that outward circle to reach back to the dot. I think it was to be a map of realistic hope. If I believed this, then yes, I would always have grief, I would always have triggers bringing me right back to that centre of pain but with time it would lessen.

I have had moms who have lost a child decades ago tell me ‘the pain never goes away but it does get softer’.  When you are new in your grief this sounds impossible.  Even now, 2 ½ years later, there is no sign of fewer triggers or the intensity of them. Grief teaches you patience.

This is where ‘embrace the pain’ comes in. If we don’t face this centre dot, this boiling point of grief, if we don’t mourn, we become stuck in ‘the dot’.  If we are stuck, then we are unable to experience the lighter moments that occur in the lines circling our grief. And that is where we need to be to live our lives and fill our purpose; with grief as a part of which we are now but new things brought in to give us moments that are (hopefully) less painful.

How this looks and how fast this happens is an individual thing. The point is to strive towards this. Good mourning is learning to live with ‘the dot’.