The Tasks of Grief

The Tasks of Grief

The Use of Mindfulness in Working with Grief

Everyone I know wants to avoid pain. In fact, I expect most everyone I know wants to avoid pain and if they are in pain, want relief from it. We spend over 3 billion dollars per year on over-the-counter pain relievers such as Tylenol, Excedrin, Ibuprofen, Aspirin, or Aleve. It’s hard to imagine what 3 billion dollars looks like, but if you were to count each of those dollars without stopping, at the rate of one per second, it would take 95 years, 53 days, 5 hours, and 20 minutes. Add to that the amount we spend on medication for emotional pain, and now it would take you 412 years, 230 days, 22 hours, and 44 minutes—non-stop — to count all of the dollars spent each year for antidepressants and over-the-counter pain relief. Now, there is a headache.

So, why go there? Because, the pain literally allows you to heal, and the only way to be free from the pain is to go through it, not around it. Allowing our self to experience the pain requires an act of surrender.

Contradictory as it may seem, it’s in surrendering that true “relief” begins. Sometimes we feel the pain will consume us. But that’s only because we see pain as the enemy rather than the friend of healing. It really is possible to experience pain and survive.

The third task is adjustment to the absence of what we have lost. The void created by loss can be enormous. The task of adjustment requires that we make space to live in the company of the physical and emotional realities that nothing is as it once was. This is a period when we begin to separating our emotional energy from what is absent. This does not mean that we don’t feel the loss. It means we learn to separate from our identification with what is absent. Differentiation is the act of knowing that “I am not this loss;” “This loss does not define who I am;” “This loss does not belong to me.”

The fourth task one of integrating the loss into the fabric of our life. In this sense, the object of loss—whether through death, separation, or life change—continues to be an integral part of our life, companioning us in a new way.

To learn about Grief as Spiritual Practice, click here.

Still, why shouldn’t we want relief from emotional and physical pain? The problem is, relief and remedy are not the same; and whereas remedies will bring relief, relief alone may postpone or even obstruct remedy, as can be the case in processing grief.

There are 4 steps, or tasks, of the grieving process.

The first task following the event of a loss — be it a death or the loss of a relationship — is “acceptance.” Now, we’ve already got a big challenge. What is meant by acceptance? Does it mean I have to like it or say it’s “okay?” In brief, it means that we must recognize what has been lost. And, it is seldom clear exactly what has been lost.

“Leaving The 6th Day,” Bodega-Sonoma Coast, CA