WHAT HAPPENED TO MY MIND?

Dealing with Grief’s Physical Side Effects

Descriptions of the many ways grief impacts your body and mind are

not always easy to find. This chapter covers some of the most common—

and

strange—effects of grief and offers tools to help support and nourish your

body

and mind as you navigate the new landscape of life after loss.

HOW (AND WHY) TO STAY ALIVE

Using tools to reduce your suffering is one of the few concrete actions

to take inside grief. Reducing suffering still leaves you with pain, however,

and

that pain can be immense.

Surviving early grief is a massive effort. Forget getting through the day;

sometimes the pain is so excruciating, the most you can aim for is getting

through the next few minutes. In this chapter, we review tools to help you

bear

the pain you’re in, what to do when that pain is too much, and we explore

why

kindness to self is the most necessary—and most difficult—medicine.

YOU CAN’T SOLVE GRIEF, BUT YOU

DON’T HAVE TO SUFFER

Living inside grief, you know there is nothing to be fixed: this can’t be

made right. While most grief support (and well-meaning friends and

family)

encourages you to move through the pain, that’s simply the wrong

approach.

The way to live inside of grief is not by removing pain, but by doing what

we can to reduce suffering. Knowing the difference between pain and

suffering

can help you understand what things can be changed and what things

simply

need your love and attention.

WHAT TO DO WITH YOUR GRIEF

ON RIGHT TIMING: A NOTE BEFORE WE GET STARTED

I devoured books on grief and loss when Matt first died. I hated most of

them. I

would flip to the back of a new book to see if the widowed author had

remarried.

If they had, I wouldn’t read the book—clearly, they did not understand

what it

was like to be me. I would get all excited reading the first few chapters of a

new

book on loss, only to hurl it away in disgust when subsequent chapters

started

talking about rebuilding my life and all the great things I might do as a

result of

this loss.

THE NEW MODEL OF GRIEF

Having traveled down into the cultural roots of grief avoidance, how do

we find our way back out? How do we become, not only people, but a

whole

wider culture, comfortable bearing the reality that there is pain that can’t

be

fixed? How do we become people who know that grief is best answered

with

companionship, not correction?

EMOTIONAL ILLITERACY AND THE

CULTURE OF BLAME

There’s such a pervasive weirdness in our culture around grief and

death. We judge, and we blame, dissect, and minimize. People look for the

flaws

in what someone did to get to this place: She didn’t exercise enough. Didn’t

take

enough vitamins. Took too many. He shouldn’t have been walking on that

side of

the road.