Jill Smolowe, an author who has written about her own experience with grieving, reflected on what pain meant to her following the death of four of her loved ones in quick succession when she was in her thirties. In her article, The Value of Sitting With Your Pain, she says, “While grappling with that pile-on of losses, I discovered that something a therapist had told me years earlier was true: my pain would be more tolerable if I could ‘just sit with it.’ “
She drew on the lesson she learned during that time when, 15 years later, her husband died. “After a battle with leukemia, my husband of 24 years, the love of my life for 28, had just died. The word ‘devastated’ doesn’t begin to cover what I was feeling. But during the two years that Joe had bounced in and out of hospitals, he and I had learned something useful: Stay in the present. Don’t get ahead of yourself. One minute at a time. One hour. One day.”
Hope group members may recognize what Solowe was dealing with as they travel along their own grief journey. There is no way to push a fast forward button with grief. There is no way around grieving, only the way through it. She confronted that reality directly. “What I know for certain is this: For the first time in my life, I didn’t try to do an end-run around my pain. Instead, I steered right into it. All of it. My loss of Joe. My loss of Joe and me. My daughter’s loss of her father. Our loss of the three of us. My loss of the life that I treasured, loved and had assumed would inform my days for several decades to come.
Grief is a complex process. Dozens of books approach the process of grieving from myriad perspectives. The wonder is that so much can be said and not simply be a repetition of what has come before. Each insight and revelation is valuable in its own right. Smolowe offers her insight, gleaned from a therapist decades earlier, to all who are grieving: “To my friend who is in so much pain,” she writes, “to any of you who currently feel like you may never see sunlight again… I offer the gift I gave myself: Allow yourself the kindness of giving your pain its due. Don’t try to argue it away. Acknowledge it. Accept it. Just sit with it.”