When you hear the word grief you normally think of the loss of loved ones, friends, or even someone you knew only in passing. Grief is normally associated with death, but we all grieve all kinds of losses. The end of a relationship, illness, moving, career changes, and other lifestyle changes are all types of losses that create grief. However, there’s a chance that people around you, or society in general, might not acknowledge or recognize these experiences as a loss. You may even feel guilty for feeling this way. This is known as disenfranchised grief. It refers to a loss that’s not openly acknowledged, socially mourned, or publicly supported. I think that people and society in general tend to disenfranchise grief and mourners by not recognizing a couple of things: the relationship between the loss and the griever, the importance of the loss, and the need to be a griever. Society also tries to regulate how, when, and how long people may grieve, and what people should and shouldn’t grieve. It all stems from the fact that grief, sadness, and depression make people uncomfortable. Therefore, people instinctually want the grievers to feel better and “get over it” as soon as possible. So, people will often try to minimize others’ grief.
In trying to minimize grief, one of the most common phrases you’ll hear when you’re grieving is “time heals all wounds.” I don’t find this to be true. I think that people think of grief as something that gets smaller over time. I would disagree. I feel like your grief may not be getting smaller, it’s just that your life grows bigger around it. You hold that same grief forever. But you change and become different and suddenly you’ve lived more than half your life without the person or thing you’re grieving, and you’ve grown so much around your grief that you can live with it.
We all live with grief because life is not constant. Things change and that’s what life is. Unexpected or expected, sudden or planned, wanted or unwanted, life is a series of changes. And when things change it is normal to miss the way things used to be. It is understandable to grieve the life you had and the person you were. And while time may not heal all wounds, with time your life does become bigger than your grief and one day you’ll notice that it doesn’t hurt as much as it used to.