What would it REALLY have been like if they were still here?
On your grief healing journey, there are many pieces to starting to see the true picture of their death. To find the meaning and beauty in it that you can’t currently see (and through which you’ll completely heal your grief for good).
One of these is having a reality check on what was good about them dying when they did.
People can get triggered by the use of the word ‘good’ here so bear with me here.
Everything in life has two sides – a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’. When we can’t see that we simply haven’t looked deeply enough yet. Now why would you want to see the death of someone you love as good? For a couple of reasons:
When you see something as just bad with no good at all, it becomes a bad memory. And over time we push bad memories away, deeper and deeper down within ourselves. And this bad memory is attached to a person….so it’s their whole memory that you’ll need to push down. This can be conscious, but for the most part it’s unconscious. It hurts when you think about their death, your mind wants to protect you from pain (and from a practical perspective you have other things in life you need to be focused on), so it slowly buries those memories deeper and deeper. But not just the memories of their death….but the whole memory of them. The more that memories of their death hurt you (which they do when you’re stuck in grief) the more all memories of them can hurt you….and the more they’ll all get buried over time. This right here is exactly why people will try and tell me that they feel like time (which doesn’t heal grief) has helped them heal grief. When I ask if they actually feel healed or if they just don’t think about that person and their death much anymore, it’s always the latter.
Another reason to see the good is that each part of someone’s life is important. I think of every part as a chapter. And the very last part – their death – is no less important than any other. If anything it’s more important because it has the power to change how you view the other chapters (with pain) and also what legacy they leave (often also pain). Every part of their life was worthy and deserves to be remembered and loved (just as every part of them was worthy and deserving of love). When you can see beauty and meaning and worth – the ‘good’ – in their death, then their whole life can be more beautiful and meaningful and worthy to you. Their entire existence – not just the parts that you like at the moment. And this completely changes the way you see them, the way you see their death and the legacy they leave behind.
To do this is an act of love. It’s a gift.
So now you have an idea of why to see the good let’s talk about the piece I mentioned. Having a reality check about what it would have been like if they were still here.
People very often have a fantasy about ‘if they were still here’. And it’s always a good fantasy. Just think of all the wonderful things they’re missing! All the time you could have spent with them! The time with the children/grandchildren/nieces and nephews! The support and love they could be giving you! Oh if only they were still here!
What people don’t tend to think about is the reality, instead of a rose-coloured vision where everything would have been wonderful. They forget the things that wouldn’t have been wonderful.
I worked with a woman over the death of her father. She missed him greatly and thought often of how much better it would be if he was still here, the love the support he would be giving her, the way he could care for his wife (a stressful role which had now fallen to her child), the time they could spend together. So we stopped and took an honest look at the situation – the age her father would have been, how his health would likely have been, what things had happened since his death that he hadn’t had to deal with. She realised that actually it would not have been a good time for her dad – there was debt, family breakdowns, divorces, deaths (some of them among the most traumatic/challenging you can imagine) of his family, and more. And she predicted that he would likely have slid deeper into the already deep depression he had been sinking in to, especially as someone who didn’t open up to others. The rose-coloured picture she imagined only applied in her fantasies. When she looked at the reality of what was coming and what things would have been like for him, the picture for him was bleak.
Another woman I worked with had a fantasy that if her father had never gotten cancer that he could’ve lived more years and done all the travelling he had talked about for years. The reality was completely divorced from her fantasy. Her father was a serious alcoholic and in such a bad way (and heading only downhill) that my client had been getting ready to cut him completely out of her life. When her father was diagnosed with cancer he quit drinking immediately. In the hospital, under treatment and very aware of his death to come, he became a light and a joy and support for many others before he died. His life completely changed but there was zero evidence that, on the track he’d been on pre-cancer, that any of my clients dreams for her father had any truth in them. Just the opposite.
For your sake and for theirs, take the time to figure out the reality for them of what life truly had in store past their death. Put down your rose-coloured glasses and set aside the fantasy of all-good for a little while and go digging for the ‘good’ of their death for them.
It doesn’t matter how hard you have to look, it is there to find. Keep digging for it – this will start to transform your feelings around their death, and start to transform and heal your grief.
Kristie
xx
