I have a wonderful friend named Paula Loring whom I consider to be the best leader of grief groups I know. She has a wonderful outline of the grieving process that I borrow from time to time. She says grief is:

When the Heart Breaks

When the Heart Bleeds

When the Heart Surrenders

and

When the Heart Heals.

I especially like the concept contained in the heart surrendering. There are several times in our journey when we face the very difficult task of surrendering and allowing the grief process to develop.

Perhaps the first time of surrender is when we allow the death to become real. Fortunately, this happens gradually as we move from denial to reality. The first days of our grief is a whirl of things being real but not real. As one mother said, “We are planning the funeral for my son, but I expect the door to open at any moment and for him to walk in.” It takes some time for the mind and heart to accept the reality that a death has actually happened. After a while the real cannot be denied and we begin to face the loss without expecting the door to open and our loved one to return. That is why our grief often hurts more a few weeks after the death than it does at the time. 

As the journey continues we face times and incidents of surrender. This can be such things as deciding to do something with clothing, taking off a wedding ring, allowing a room to be used for some other purpose, or some other decision or change. There is no right way nor right time to face these changes. We do them when we feel like doing them, and, most of the time, we will know when it is time for us to do so.

At some point in the grieving process we face the ultimate surrender. We allow our thoughts and feelings to no longer be totally dominated by the loss. That does not mean our journey is over. Nor does it mean we have stopped loving or honoring the loved one. It means we are willing to begin relating to them through memories instead of trying to keep certain feelings and the sense of presence alive and fresh. 

In past blogs I have told of the woman who said her daughter now lived on her shoulder and in her heart. She said she felt, and was comforted by her presence there. She held her hand in front of her eyes and said that is where her daughter was right after her death. She thought of nothing else. She stopped being a person and became a full time bereaved parent. 

She told how her daughter would begin to slip a little. An hour or so would pass without her thinking of her; then several hours. At first this would create panic. She thought she was forgetting her daughter. She would do things to remind herself to grieve in an effort to keep the feelings and the pain fresh and alive. Then one day she felt like it was all right for her daughter to move. She said it was a journey from face to face to heart to heart and that journey is long and very hard to do. That movement is surrender.

We may get up to that point many times before we can let go. I have a friend who struggled at this point for many years. She was afraid of losing touch with her daughter. If we had a good session together I knew the next session would be tough. She would go home and read her daughter’s diaries or look at picture albums until she was a basket case. She felt closer to her daughter when she was crying and was afraid to stop. 

A recent study about what the researchers called complicated grief dealt with folks who could not turn loose of the pain. They could not surrender and allow the process to move forward. Fortunately, there came a day when my friend could surrender. She faced the choice of whether or not to live again and chose to live. That is surrender and that is hard to do.

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