by Greg Lincoln
Stressful situations surround us every day. I guess you could say it is a part of life and we have to find ways to work through those, to endure them, and then continue on.
Each one of us has our own certain methods that we use to manage stress. Stress can produce emotions that can be upsetting and depending on our individuality, the way we deal with it can be different.
Grief is a kind of stress. It puts pressure on your tolerance to pain, sometimes compressing you so hard that it may seem hopeless to recover from. Stress produced from bereavement grief is like this. Fear turns into stress, stress is pain, pain hurts.
The more emotionally strong a person is, their reactions to stress are more complex and are more useful and beneficial. For those less emotionally mature, their reactions are inefficient and are more likely to cause other problems, such as when someone turns to harmful substances to deal with their pain.
So what can we do? It depends on you. For some people, looking at artwork helps. It is a strange thing to try to explain, but when you look at art, your mind goes on a trip where it searches through the vast annals your life experiences trying to connect what you are looking at to what you have experienced. Sometimes there is a connection and you find yourself searching your mind further and further until you achieve that moment of understanding.
This relieves you for even a moment if you are going through a stressful time. That small break could be what you need. For those suffering from bereavement grief, this could be one of those respites from the grief that is everpresent, everpatient, always there waiting for you.
Grieving, once unknown, can become part of a person’s life and will remain for the rest of their days.
Even now today we cannot believe that it is now the second year that we have lost our beloved. When we close our eyes to try to fathom the time aspect, it is incomprehensible. It has been months and months, yet it still feels like yesterday.
And we still find ourselves asking why, why, why. We whisper it in our prayers, when we are alone, when we are falling asleep on our pillows at night. Maybe that is also part of grieving. Thank you to those folks who have taken a moment to chat about these grief articles, either in person or by email or messages. We appreciate your encouragement and words of support, your kindness. Grieving is a global thing, can you imagine that? Even in the uttermost reaches of the world there could be a grieving person, we are all in this together.
