Grieving Who You Were and Who You Will Never Be

Grieving Who You Were and Who You Will Never Be

When death strikes, life changes. Nothing will ever be the same again.

Initially, everything focuses on the person who has died. They are the central figure who’s absence everyone is talking about and now needing to adjust to and it feels unbelievable and impossible. We go through the motions, tell the stories, see the friends and family, and go home and we’ve missed something. What we miss in the immediacy of grief and can miss if we aren’t paying attention, is what and who else has died. We begin to realize that we must now grieve who we were and who we will never be.

We are redefined by loss, never again to be the same.

In grief we are constantly assessing the steadiness of our new foundation; “What does this mean? Who was I and who am I now? Will I ever be ok again?”

The above and below are all different versions of “will I be ok?” and they are worth asking:

What does life mean to me now?

What would my loved one want me to do?

What can I do?

What can’t I do?

What has changed about me?

Who was I?

Am I still them?

Who am I now?

Who will I be?

Journaling through these questions can be extremely helpful to get down the scrambled thoughts and scattered feelings. Assess the damage. Assess the fear. Assess the hope.

What of yourself have you lost? This identity and dream-loss is the secondary side of grief that the griever alone has to mourn. It seems like it should be enough that we mourn our loved one, but no – we are all the time trying to understand and make sense of how their death affects and changes us. This is how you survive. The loss of a person central to your life will radically redefine what you are centered around. The loss of the future that was planned, the loss of all the assumed and hoped for days together, the loss of an entire way of being in the world all has to be reconciled. It’s more than just missing them, it’s grieving the fact that someone who knew you well is gone and now, you are less known and understood.

You are left in a life designed with someone else in mind that now has to be reconfigured and you didn’t want to reconfigure it in the first place.

This isn’t a fresh-start – it’s a forced restart.

While the questions above have a lot to offer but I think a question stands out that grievers deserve to ask themselves:

Who do I want to be?

This is a very important and persistent question. The answer may shift and change from day-to-day and that’s fine. But moving through your grief with intention is a beautiful way to honor your loved one.Thinking about who you are, feeling what you want to be, taking small, incremental steps into your new, forming self gives your life a focus, a meaning, and yields something new that you weren’t expecting. When you are intentional about your grief and about who you want to be it gets a lot harder to become stuck in the bitterness and isolation that can ensnare griever who aren’t diligent and attentive to their pain.

Allow something new, allow for change, allow for the pain and the growth together. Nothing in life is clean or easy; everything is “both, and …” This is just to say you will not wake up some magical morning knowing exactly who you want to be and feel grief-free with sunshine and butterflies outside your window. While I wish that for you, this will undoubtedly be a process full of conflicting feelings and steps forward and back. My hope for you is that you will be thoughtful as you grieve and mindful of what has shifted in you as a new perspective on life unfolds. Perhaps, on the other side of grief instead of a permanently shattered self, there can instead be a more compassionate, kind, and wise you.

…

Questions for you to sit with & journal about:

How has death changed you?

When you think about who you were before is it hard to recognize yourself?

What ways are you intentional with your grief?