When you grieve, you are in the eye of the storm – battered about by your up and down emotions. As the initial storm subsides and the sea of your life calms a bit, you tentatively put a foot out to test if you’ve reached solid ground.
However, just as when you get off a boat and it takes a while to get your “land legs” back, so it is with grief. You might be shaky at the beginning as you attempt new tasks and take on the world alone.
Grief is a process that can’t be hurried, no matter how much you just want to be done with it. I suggest that you do your “work” but let it unfold rather than giving yourself a strict timetable for you to feel a certain way.
Loss, and the subsequent act of grieving, is a transformational event in one’s life, and it will change you in ways you don’t even know yet. I like how Haruki Murakami phrases this concept as follows.
“And once the storm is over you won’t remember how you made it through, or how you managed to survive. You won’t even be sure in fact, whether the storm is really over. But one thing is certain, when you come out of the storm you won’t be the same person who walked in.”
