Grief Is Natural... In A Group

Upworthy recently put this story up about grief in the animal kingdom. As I read through it, I kept coming back to how there were groups of animals mourning. It was not just one individual mourning for another and then moving on solo, the animals generally have a herd or a flock or a pod to move forward with.

When we have the wake or the memorial or the funeral or the ash-spreading or whatever we do... We tend to do that as a group. There is community, there is family, there is someone to hold you up and vice versa in those tremendous moments of loss. But then life goes back to how it was (sort of). Our society has changed so much that we don't live together or even near each other anymore, so if we're not processing our lives together, I suppose we can't be expected to process our deaths together either.

This means that we individually process our grief. There may be phone calls and visits with friends that include tears, but for the most part it does seem that our true grief is alone, in quiet moments, in too early hours, in songs played on the radio. No one can speed that process up, nor should they, but when you do it alone over and over and over, it starts to become part of your own narrative.

Currently I'm living in this place of grief. There are other things happening in my life, but I know that conversations continually come back to my Dad right now, because that is what I am working on. But no one else in my current bubble is in it with me. They can honor it and listen to it and be with me through it, and I am grateful grateful grateful for that. But the mourning has been primarily on my own. I don't know if that would be true if I was with family during this time. Perhaps I would speak more to them about the mourning and the missing and the grieving parts and that would allow me to speak to my friends about other things because I wouldn't be looking for a social outlet for my grief, for a community to support me in it. Family would be that community. Family needs to be that support. We have each other, we need to be able to get through the grief together as well.