You Are Not Your Grief

Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year, begins tonight.  Unlike the secular New Year in January, Jewish New Year is celebratory but also contemplative.  It’s a serious holiday that requires participants to do a lot of soul-searching.  How did you live this past year?  Whom did you hurt?  What do you want to do differently this upcoming year?  Who needs an apology?  There’s 100% less champagne, and 100% more gut-twisting thinking.

And there is also beautiful ritual that weaves through the holiday into the following 10 days leading to Yom Kippur.  You get a little over a week and a half to contemplate who you are and who you want to be.  There’s a weight to that.

Lifehacker had a post about grief; how to help someone who is grieving.  It’s all good advice, mostly advice you already know.  But there was a part at the end that changed the way I see grief.  The therapist, Emily Adams,  interviewed in the article states:

She also said it’s important to remember that grief is a ritual. We get through it by participating in it. Yell on a mountain top, write a letter in the forest and bury it, cry in the sea. Let yourself express your loss so you don’t just have it sitting there inside you, unchanging … Your grief isn’t you. It’s just a part of your life.

Grief is a ritual.  We get through it by participating in it.  No one can grieve for you, and because the ritual is personal, no two expressions of grief look alike.

It’s not a thought that makes grief any easier, any more than knowing that the fasting on Yom Kippur is ritual makes your stomach growl less.  But it does allow for some space between the person and the feeling as well as an understanding of the point to the feeling; that we are trying to make sense and honour the space we’re in.

Maybe it just struck me because I read it before I’m about to enter multiple days of ritual, but it helped me to realize grief for what it is; something that is doing its hardest to help during a time period that only hurts.