Grief and Loss: Learning to Live With We Cannot Change

I mean, all of us at some point have or will experience grief.

And I remember I've lost both my parents at young ages and my grandparents.

So it's something very familiar to me.

And grief in and of itself is part of the universal human experience.

But I think it's also...

I think when we hear the word grief, we just think about, you know, death, you know, losing a parent, a spouse, a sibling, a pet, a close friend.

But grief, I think, is definitely much broader than that.

You know, we grieve the end of a relationship.

We grieve lost opportunities.

We grieve the person we used to be before death.

an illness a trauma some major life change and you know we can eat people i think people even grieve like the childhood they never had um things i kind of a concept i i've called like memories of the future when you like you're in a relationship you you picture the the house that you were going to live in and the vacations you're going to take and the children you were going to have um So, you know, I think the most painful losses are, are the ones nobody else recognizes.

And, um, And something I want to make sure I convey is grief is not a sign of weakness.

It's evidence that something mattered.

And the depth of our grief often reflects, I think, the significance of our attachment, you know, the meaning of what was lost and the change that the loss then creates in our lives, the different pathways we've taken, the different paths options and choices we have to inevitably make.

But, you know, the goal of healing is not to erase the loss.

It's to learn how to live fully again without denying what we've experienced.

And, you know, grief is not...

It's definitely more than sadness.

It's really... a multi-dimensional response that involves emotions and cognitions, physical actions like crying or anger, social changes.

And it's not simply sadness.

The grief involves anger and guilt and woulda, coulda, shouldas and anxiety and numbness, disbelief, confusion.

It's a nice relief and even moments of happiness.

And personally, I can say from experience, you know, the most recent loss of my father, I experienced all these emotions.

And I'll talk about some of the different models of grief, but it's not like you say in this stage for, you know, two months and you go to this stage for three months.

It's not like that.