There is no “cure” for grief. It is not something we get over and done with. A chunk has been bitten from your heart and it will not grow back. As I have said in these blogs, the best we can hope for is that the terrible pain you feel now will one day be a dull ache but the dull ache will be there reminding you of your love and of your loss for as long as you live. There will never be a time when the pain cannot be stirred up again. A note last week telling me that a child who died ten years ago would have been 34 years old that day, was a simple notice that the mother’s pain had returned for a spell even that long after the death. 

But we do turn the corner in the way we cope. There comes a time in the journey when we must decide whether or not to live again. Some folks decide not to do so, of course, but most folks face that question and decide to live. The question and the decision can be a great turning point in the grief journey. Usually people know when this is happening. The experience can be that dramatic or it may be marked by their being able to deal with something they have not been able to deal with or have delayed dealing with. A chair they could not sit in and now they can. Clothes they could not part with, a room they could not change. Then, for no known reason, they are ready to face the challenge.

A woman said she was walking across the street to her car after church one Sunday and right in the middle of the street it hit her that she had to decide right then whether or not to live again. She decided to live.

I told another friend that the day would come when she would turn the corner in the way she coped and said there might be something she could not deal with that she would be able to deal with then. She said, “It is the desk in my den. All the family pictures are in that roll top desk and I cannot force myself to unlock it and look at the pictures. When I can clean it out, I will know.” She called me one night and asked me to come to her home. When I arrived she was standing in front of an opened an clean desk. She had decided to live again.

I received a wonderful letter last week from a woman who said she had taken her parent’s phone numbers off of her cell phone call list. Doing so was her indication that she was turning some corner in her grief journey.

I think we put far too much pressure on folks to clean out closets and get rid of possessions before they are ready to do so. I guess we think an empty closet doesn’t hurt as much as a full one, but gradually dealing with the possessions is a healing part of the process. One of my favorite sayings is that grief is like peeling an onion, it comes off one layer at a time and you cry a lot. If that be so, the gradual removal of things would fit the peeling one layer at a time.

A young man was hit by a truck and killed. He was a very successful young businessman with all of the trappings of that success. The day before the funeral his father and father-in-law were in the front yard discussing an estate sale to help his widow get rid of those possessions. They were particularly interested in selling his boat. He had invested in a boat company and had a custom built boat that was his pride and joy. The two men were intent on selling the boat. They thought it would be too much of a reminder to her and knew she would never have any use for it.

I asked them not to have a sale and to keep the boat. I told them she needed the boat and of course they countered with “she will never put that boat in the water.” I said “You are right but she still needs the boat. One day she will decide to pull the boat out of the garage and put it in storage. That will be a big day for her. Then, the day will come when she will sell the boat and that will be an even bigger day.”

I watched her progress and happened to know the day she put the boat in storage. A tough but healing day. Then one day the boy’s father said, “Do you remember when we wanted to sell that boat?” I said I did. He said, “I wish we had done so. She is ready to sell the boat and I am going to buy it. I don’t need a boat, but I can’t let anyone else own it.” I told him to find a good place to store it because he would never sell it.

The journey is a process of gradually peeling away and then the day comes when we turn those big corners and decide to live again.

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