There’s been a shift in what I talk about on this blog, and first off, I want to reassure that I will still be talking about spiritual storytelling, and that is my focus. But there’s one thing I realize both as I go through my own spiritual care, but also help others is that grief plays a larger role than we think about. As a society we don’t want to talk about grief. And when grief comes up, people often think of it in relation to the loss of a loved one. They don’t think about all the other types of grief that we deal with, especially if you’re chronically ill, disabled, or neurodivergent.
There’s also the aspect that grief is messy. Society wants you to “get over it” because too many people don’t learn how to sit with others, how to companion them through whatever is happening in their life. When someone else is grieving it can bring up our own feelings of loss or our own feelings of mortality. If you’re lucky in America you get a day or two of bereavement leave, which is usually the day of a funeral, and then it’s back to work, back to “normal” without realizing that normal really doesn’t exist and loss is a natural part of our life.
Grief has been something I have thought about since editing and publishing an anthology on the topic called Neurodivergent Voices Volume 1: Grief. It was then I realized that not only was the time I was given for bereavement leave not enough, but that there were many other things in my life that I hadn’t properly grieved. Life transitions like layoffs, moves, friends moving in and out of your life, or even grieving not knowing that you were neurodivergent or grieving for the past you who didn’t have supports, are all different manifestations of grief, and there are more.
Understanding and processing this grief is a part of our spiritual story. Knowing about this grief and working with it, as a natural part of living, not as something to be gotten rid of or gotten over, can help us find our authentic selves. It can help us see life as a series of transitions, and that the trajectory is never smooth.
So that is why I’m talking about grief. Because it is part of love. We cannot grieve if we didn’t love (or at least care), and it is something to sit with and to learn to live with rather than to ignore.
