Grief is the response to death.
It can be used figuratively to refer to any loss, including of a job or a car or even more trivial things, but this muddies the question, as there’s a fundamental difference between death and other types of loss. There’s also a fundamental difference between someone you know dying and someone whose life is entwined with yours dying.
What follows, therefore, pertains to grief in the proper sense, in particular the death of close family members or closest friends. People are often sensitive on this issue, and understandably so. If what follows rubs you up the wrong way, feel free to ignore it. It’s not the last word. It’s merely one person’s position borne of extensive experience.
When my life is in entwined with someone else’s, there’s a real gap when they die, and it can take years for new structures to be built to plug the gap entirely, especially with friendship. One necessarily feels the gap as pain. This must simply be endured. God starts to fill the gap quickly, however, as nature abhors a vacuum, and the time will literally be filled with something. As when a tree is cut down, other plants previously overshadowed flourish.
There’s also the loss of the future one thought one was going to have. What the death often reveals is a false dependence on people rather than God. The truth is that a perfectly good future is still available regardless of who is there or not there.
There’s furthermore the question of shock, which can arise even in the case of a predicted death. The actual death itself is necessarily shocking. This pertains in particular to the first couple of weeks. Dreams will be alarming. Be prepared for that but do not interpret the dreams.
In those with a metaphysical sensitivity, there is an eery sense of being separated from the person who is being relocated to a transcendent realm, which feels something like the two parts of Velcro being separated. This is alarming and disagreeable unless one recognises what is going on. The explanation makes sense of it, and it is reduced to ordinary pain. Not everyone will experience this.
There’s moreover the compassion for others affected, although it’s advisable to remain as detached as possible, whilst being of practical help. One’s own unhappiness is enough.
If one hasn’t forgiven or made amends, the death is going to be particularly nasty to deal with. Get going on forgiving and writing and reading out an amends letter in a church or at the grave. Do not delay this. Better late than never.
There are often practical nuisances—funeral shenanigans and probate dramas. Deal with this in an entirely detached and pragmatic way and place the situation in God’s hands. Be 100% diplomatic and keep your opinions to yourself.
Other people are likely not to be self-contained in how they deal with their grief. One is likely to be exposed to all sorts of outbursts, including very out-of-character outpourings. Do not react to these. Listen and witness but do not interfere, and do not debate or argue. People will try to ‘explain’ what happened. Do not engage in this. But do not shut them down either.
Although the process takes years to run through to its conclusion, and echoes can patter down the decades, the fact is one can be perfectly stable and even happy throughout it, provided one adopt a spiritual approach, by doing the following:
1. Recognise that God provides me with everything I need at all times: the channels for that goodness might change, but the goodness is always available.
2. Recognise that people are only ever temporarily provided to me; they are not given in perpetuity, and I have no entitlement to them. I must immediately adopt a position of graceful acceptance and gratitude for the time I was indeed given.
3. Treat everything as God’s actual will or as permitted by God but don’t try to figure out ‘why’. Not a helpful question.
4. Avoid all narratives of fear, guilt, shame, resentment, or self-pity. These add an extra layer of unhappiness and actually serve to shut down the grief process (which is unfamiliar) by replacing it with ordinary everyday disgruntlement (which is familiar). Work a very strong daily programme with a very high level of discipline, adopting a mix of pragmatism plus vigilance for the ego’s co-option of the situation to run amok.
5. Avoid retailing the recent death to all who will listen or coopting the situation dramatically to garner shock, sympathy, or compassion or to justify misery, ingratitude, or that pathetic self-pity that is so enticing in such situations. One simply does not need other people’s reactions to deal with, as well. These can veer from the callous and glib at one end to the sentimental and patronising at the other. It might be a tragedy but it’s not a crisis, and it’s not the universe commissioning a floorshow with me as the star. It’s possible in such situations to entirely eclipse the poor person who has died and take centre-stage. I try not to do that. Best to talk through what needs talking through with one or two people rather than going door to door.
6. Keep everything normal going as far as possible. The disaster is shutting down normal life to sit inside the grief plus all of the ego phenomena that are liable to piggy-back on top of it. Unfortunately, people will queue round the block to enable this. This does not help and can easily derail a person’s entire life. I know of people who remain trapped inside an admitted tragedy because they refuse to engage in the process of acceptance, detachment, and resumption of everyday life. There is nothing so salutary as work, ordinariness, and continuing to engage constructively in helping others.
7. Avoid the temptation to engage in spiritualism.
There’s more that can be said, but the above has served me well and enabled me to handle the deaths of parents, siblings, and best friends pretty much unscathed.