Your Grief & Heartbreak Will Get Better the Moment You Watch This

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  If you can find a way to grieve fully, you'll be able to live fully.

  Grief expert David Kessler says loss stretches your capacity for pain and also your capacity for joy and laughter. His goal for grief work is to eventually 'remember with more love than pain.' He reminds people that 'you come from a long line of dead people.' Every ancestor grieved, and something in us knows how.

• 02

  We live in a 'grief-illiterate' world that expects grief to follow a TV script.

  On TV, episode one someone dies, episode two we cry, episode three it's back to normal. Real grief 'has a longer shadow.' Kessler says people most often reach out to a professional around five years after a loss, after years of wishing it away, and the second most common time is just after one year, when they expected it to be gone.

• 03

  Early grief lasts about two years.

  If a friend seems to be 'taking too long,' they're probably still in early grief. Of roughly 18,000 listener emails, Kessler and Mel estimate about 99% described guilt or pressure to move on. People telling them it's time to move on usually haven't lost the same kind of person.

• 04

  There are different grieving styles, and practical grievers aren't heartless.

  Some people do a week or two of memorials and then want to move on. Kessler calls them practical grievers. They were practical about divorce and moves too, and they don't change during a big loss. Emotional grievers think practical grievers don't feel enough, and practical grievers think emotional grievers feel too much. Neither group needs to change the other.

• 05

  Grief bursts and love bursts are both normal.

  Something at work or a song can trigger a sudden wave of grief that overwhelms you. You'll also get sudden waves of love for the person, just as your feelings toward them varied when they were alive.

• 06

  Don't compare losses. The worst grief is yours.

  When we compare, we're in our heads, but 'we don't have a broken mind, we have a broken heart.' Grief isn't a pie where someone else's loss takes a slice of yours. A fiancée of three months and a spouse of 40 years are both grieving.

• 07

  Numbness and denial protect you, and complicated grief goes in circles.

  Kessler calls numbness a wise mind 'titrating' feelings, giving you only as much as you can handle. People who come to deal with a loss 5, 10 or 20 years later are 'ready now.' Complicated grief is like a big branch that falls into a river: the water starts to swirl, 'no longer evolving, it's revolving.' The fix is to examine the branch, be with it and talk about it.

• 08

  The meaning isn't in the loss. It's in who you become.

  There is no meaning in a child's death or a tragedy, and a loss is not 'a test, a lesson... a gift or a blessing.' Meaning shows up after you 'excavate the pain,' and choosing to live again is a decision.

• 09

  Anger is pain's bodyguard, and guilt is grief's companion.

  People who cry get tissues. People who get angry get treated 'like a porcupine,' yet they're in just as much pain and need a hug just as much. Guilt and 'if only' bargaining stick around because the mind would rather feel guilty than helpless: guilt offers a sense of control.

• 10

  Grief has to be witnessed, not fixed.

  Instead of 'Dad's always with you,' ask: 'What's it like to sit across from that empty chair tonight?' What they say will make you uncomfortable and you'll want to fix it, but no one is broken. Accept the person as who they are now.