What to Expect When You’re Grieving: Three Things I’ve Learned

I was 39 when I received a group email asking for urgent prayer for my daddy, who had just been rushed to the hospital. I don’t think the pastor of his church ever knew that’s how I found out my daddy was dying. My mom had forgotten their cell phones in the rush to the hospital. It was a small town. Someone saw them, called their pastor, and the pastor emailed the whole church address book. That is how I learned.

Death, whether expected or shocking, is always our enemy. Grief, in all its forms–agonizing, numbing, excruciating, disorienting, is a fitting response to the brutality of the rending of soul from flesh.

Is anyone an expert on grief? I’m not. But I’ve learned some things.

Grief gets better. Not necessarily quickly. Not necessarily in the way you expect. But the rawness of grief does change. There are moments when breathing feels easier, when you can remember the person you lost without being completely undone. There can be laughter again. There can be genuine joy alongside the sorrow. That doesn’t mean you are forgetting them or that your grief wasn’t real. It means you are learning to live with an absence that you never wanted.

Grief takes much longer than you think. This may be one of the hardest things to understand when you are grieving. You may expect to feel better after a few months, or after the first holiday, or after the anniversary of the death. But grief doesn’t follow a predictable schedule. Even when the intensity begins to lessen, grief can resurface unexpectedly. A song, a familiar place, a birthday, a smell, or an ordinary Tuesday can bring tears you thought were finished. There is no timetable by which you are supposed to be “over it.”

Grief never completely goes away. I don't mean that you will always feel as devastated as you did at the beginning. You won’t (most of the time). But when someone you deeply love dies, God uses the void they left to shape you. Perhaps that is why grief can return years later. We don't simply grieve the act of death. We grieve all the moments that person will never be part of…the phone calls, the text messages,, the milestones, the mundane, the memories we don’t get to make together.

These are the things I say little by little, over and over again, in the counseling room:

It gets better.

It takes a whole lot longer than you’d think.

And it never completely goes away.

They are also the things I remind myself when I am waiting for the day when every tear will finally be wiped away. For now, grief is a fitting response to loss. It is not a failure of faith, and it is not something we need to rush past. And for those of us who grieve with hope, we can acknowledge the terrible reality of death while also looking forward to the day when death itself will finally be defeated.