How Long Is Grief Supposed to Last?

Walking along beside the river today before the heat of the day got going, I came across this little family sitting on a log, and I felt joy, bubbling up within me.  Easy to feel joy on a beautiful summer’s day, you might think.  Not so.  There was a period in my life when I believed I would never feel joy again.  I wasn’t even sure I wanted to.

Ten years ago my husband died in the middle of the night. The experience destroyed my cognitive capacity for quite some time.  I was operating at a distance from my life.  My memories weren’t forming properly, and I lost a load of memories from the year or so before.  My cognitive functioning slowed down to a crawl.  I was struggling.

Kind people leapt into action, but they couldn’t possibly know.  People who have been through it have a clearer idea, but nobody knows exactly what’s going on for each individual.  We process the shock of the worst thing we could imagine happening in our own way.

At the time, I was existing in a parallel reality.  I could see the people around me.  I could interact with them, answer their questions, thank them for their help, their kindness, their sorrow.  But I could retain very little.  I have very few memories of that time, even now.  People called.  People offered help.  I have no doubt.  I just don’t remember.

I do remember the overwhelming weight of loss, sitting on me like a raincloud made of heaviness.   That part I remember - the weight, the extraordinary weight of those clouds.

And then, I remember one or two occurrences that pierced through the clouds.  Mostly the nasty stuff.  The good stuff, of which I have no doubt there was plenty, rarely made it into my memory banks.  I remember the spite of certain people.  I remember the suffering of his son, my stepson, when he realised he would be losing his weekends of respite from a terrible homelife.

One of the kinder things I do remember, and that’s because I latched onto it and it became less helpful than it was intended to be.  It was a comment, made to my mother, by a very well intentioned relative who had been through a similar loss at a similar age to me (I was 42):  she said, “She’s in for a rough two years.”

Somehow, amidst the chaos of that time, the two years thing caught in my head.  It would be a rough two years.  And then it would get better.  I don’t think I ever consciously thought that, but there was now a limit imposed upon my grief.  This sadness couldn’t be this weighty for ever.  It would take two years.

Of course, as the days went by things became a bit easier, more manageable, less intolerable.  My brain regained some of its functioning.

The relentless impossibility of those first few weeks lifted somewhat to make life at least navigable.  And I went back to university to do a masters and give my mind something else to do.

And I fought off the grief.  I pushed it away with self pity, with anger, with distractions.

Then the two year point arrived.  The sadness was still there.

I realised it was never going to get better because he would always be gone.

Funnily enough, this was a really helpful realisation.  It lifted the burden.  I didn’t have to recover.  I didn’t have to get over him.  He was lost to me and that would never change.  But my life was continuing on.  The revelation that it would never get better was the permission I needed to let the sadness be, at long last.  The simple act of not resisting it caused it to lose the impermeable heaviness.

I put down my sword and shield.  I stopped fighting my grief.  And I started to feel lighter, more of the time.

This question of how long it will take to feel better is something that comes up a lot with newly grieving people.

The problem started for me with the idea of ‘getting over’ grief.  As if his loss was an illness, and in time, I would spring out of it, hale and hearty, to return to my life with vigour and enthusiasm.

Loss robbed me of vigour and enthusiasm.  He wasn’t coming back to life.  I resisted the reality of that harsh fact as vehemently as I could, for as long as I needed.

Acceptance is the ‘cure’.  It allows the space for a new life to begin, it allows for curiosity and experimenting, and finding a new path.

But I didn’t want to accept.

Acceptance means freedom, but it also means letting go.  And that feels like a letting go of love and a letting go of hopes.  It wasn’t just my husband who went.  It was all the plans that we had.  It was the future that would never get to be.

Another future was about to start, but it was a long time before I was ready to accept that.  It was  a long time before I was able to plan again.  Planning didn’t work out so well, last time.  The train we made together, that carried us along, planning and creating and building a future, slammed painfully into a wall.

So there were a lot of reasons that I didn’t heal, largely because I didn’t want to.  I just wanted to hit the rewind button, go back and do it again, make him engage with doctors, try him on a better diet, find the answer to keeping him alive.

That two year point was an important stage for me.  For the first time, I acknowledged to myself that he really wasn’t coming back.  I knew this, rationally, consciously, of course.  But not in my heart.  My body didn’t know this.  The realisation hit me at every level - mind, heart, body, soul.  And this was the acceptance I needed.  I didn’t need to put a positive spin on it, which is what I had believed acceptance to be up until that point.  I didn’t need to retell the story in a way that depicted it as a good thing that he’s not here.

I just needed to know in my being that this was the new reality.  And when that happened, finally, I was able to feel the feelings I had been avoiding.

For me, those first two years of grief were a holding space.  I couldn’t allow myself to feel the full extent of my emotions - they were too big, it was too hard.  This point of acceptance of the reality of the situation reshaped those emotions into a more manageable form, and from there I could proceed.

I remember thinking:  “I am a sad person now.”  And that is true.  I have more sadness than I ever had before.  But what I have discovered is - that’s not all I have.  I can carry this sadness, and if I accept that, I can also carry happiness.  I can also carry hope.  I can also carry freedom.

If I fight the sadness, or judge it in any way, I can’t have the full range of emotions.  Sadness then covers the full landscape in front of me.

If I can let the sadness be there, other emotions come in.

Some people get to this much sooner, some later, and presumably, some never do.

Grief is so complex.  Our experience of it is borne out of our attitudes and beliefs, our particular set of personality traits, our confidence and our insecurities.  Grief unravels us.  And it is up to us how we put ourselves back together.

It takes time to reach the place where we even want to do that.

It takes courage to face the reasons why we may not want to.

When he was alive, I borrowed his courage.  And then he died, and I had to find my own.

I was faced with finding out who I was without him.  I had to learn to find my Self again, as a solo person instead of one who was intrinsically linked with another.

Grief forces us into that process, and we may fight it for all that we are worth, but the way forward involves going solo, at least for a while.  Finding a life for ourselves that is all about finding Self, honouring Self, realising Self.

And it’s not easy to do that when all we want to do is be a part of the Two from which we have been wrenched.

How long does it take?

However long it takes.  And not a moment less.

And we just have to let it.

Ultimately, mindfulness helped me to find my way to joyful moments again, and then to greater and greater acceptance, from which flowed greater ease and peace.

It showed me that the acceptance I needed was not simply a letting go of my husband, but an accepting of the pain of his loss.  When I was able to do that, a strange thing happened - joy and life and fun and enthusiasm became possible.

If you’re in the midst of grief, there are people out there who can help you.  Sue Ryder runs Grief Kind Spaces (https://www.sueryder.org/grief-support/about-bereavement-and-grief/grief-kind/grief-kind-spaces/) in many parts of England.  These are spaces where you can go and meet other people who understand grief and loss, and you can talk about anything you want.  They also offer online resources for support.  And counselling could help you, especially if the counsellor you find has been through this kind of loss themselves.

Once you’ve come through the first phase of grief and are in a place where you’re looking to move forward with your life, and do that investigative work of understanding yourself and your emotions, you may be interested in my Mindful Peace Programme, which is an MBCT course focused on moving forward after grief or loss.  (MBCT stands for Mindfulness-Based Cognitive Therapy, although it isn’t therapy so much as a practical toolkit to help you work through difficult emotions and find your way to your new life.)  The course is 8 weeks, online, and the sessions are two hours a week, with a day long virtual retreat towards the end.  Message me to arrange a chat if you’d like to find out more and book.