My Journey Through Loss & Sorrow

How do you deal with loss?

This is a common question that has been asked by people from all walks of life.

Experiencing and feeling loss is inevitably something we are all faced with at some point in our journey of life. No matter where you are born and raised, this experience unites us all from one end of the globe to the next. What makes a difference is how each individual person deals or copes with the pain and sorrow of loss. There are many different types of loss, such as the death of a loved one, the end of a marriage, sudden loss of a career or job you may have held for many years and while all the aforementioned circumstances may be different they all have one thing in common in that they considerably change the circumstances of your life where you may have been making plans for the future you are now left mourning the future that you had planned that is no more.

For today I would like to focus on losses related to the death of a loved one, friend, or co-worker. My experiences have taught me that the question of "how do you deal with loss?" has a very individual answer for each person walking that journey. My own experience with the death of loved ones goes as far back as when I was a newborn baby, now, of course, I have no memory of this but the story was told to me by my late father who explained that I was born just weeks before my grandfather passed away and in those days Jamaican tradition had a ritual of placing newborn babies into the casket with the deceased, the thought was that this would prevent the spirit of the deceased from haunting the young one that they never had an opportunity to know while they lived. There it began and for all intents and purposes, it seems the losses never stopped.

Losing people seemed so common throughout my life's journey that I started to view life as just chapters of goodbyes. I lost about 5 people starting as far back from the youngest age that I could even comprehend death, and then through my teenage years lost 4 family members, in my adult life I've lost 5 coworkers, 4 friends, 9 family. The past 3 years have been a season of grieving, I buried my mother exactly 1 month before my 49th birthday in 2020. A few months later my sister passed away and a few months after that my Godfather who was my church Pastor also died, all within 1yr before I turned 50. The devastation I felt trying to come to terms with it all was so overwhelming, for the first time in my life I wondered how I would process these losses due to the sheer volume of my sorrow. At first, I mourned for each one and then attempted to move forward similar to how I dealt with the many other deaths in the past but I was so sad and it didn't seem to be changing, 6 months after my Pastor had passed my heart was broken to a degree I couldn't seem to comprehend. There were additional losses during this time such as the loss of relationships which I was also trying to heal from, I had to acknowledge that this too was adding to the accumulation of my grief. Put that together with the fact that the world was in mourning due to the insurmountable volume of death due to the pandemic it was just death, death every day. My sadness was unlike anything I had previously experienced I had to stop.

My Steps to Healing

1) Be honest with myself - I finally admitted to myself that I was not okay and that just going day by day through the motions was not helpful.

2) Lighten my load - The only way forward for me was to just decide to take time out of planning activities and attending functions. I tried to stick to the activities necessary for daily life and gave myself grace with all the rest.

3) More time for reflection - I put a hold on conversations with friends and turned to my faith for comfort. I attended church services and took time on my own to sit and meditate, to feel and reflect on each loss

4) Acceptance - While taking time to reflect on each loss I was able to get to a place where I understood that there is no way around the grief you must go through to come to a place of acceptance which included accepting the circumstances surrounding each loss.

5) Move forward - After I admitted to myself that I was not okay and that this was different than anything I had dealt with before. I found that the cumulative effect of multiple losses had compounded my grief and it was just overwhelming so I had to find a different approach to get on the road to healing. Some may say it's not good to isolate yourself that way but it was what I needed to do in this circumstance. After taking the time to focus only on myself and how these losses have changed my life, I began taking the steps to move forward in my my new reality.

So when someone asks How do you deal with loss?" There is no cookie-cutter answer to that question because everyone's loss and the circumstances surrounding the loss are different. No one should place parameters around someone's grieving, it is as individual as our DNA. The grief process will last as long or as short as it does, the important thing is to make sure that you don't get stuck there. Ensure that you are moving through the grief however you choose to do that maybe speaking to a therapist, or support groups, if you are a spiritual person then rely on your faith and your church to help you through, or maybe speak with friends or loved ones to help heal the wounds of sorrow. My approach was to stop and live with my sorrow in silence and to drown out all the unnecessary noise, it was during that time that I realized that my sorrow was deepened by the circumstances surrounding each of my recent losses and I needed to find a way to come to terms with that.

Find a process that works for you no matter how you do it as long as you are walking the journey through the sorrow and not attempting to go around it by ignoring the pain or just trying to put it out of your mind. The best way is through it, feel the pain, think about the loss and whatever circumstances may surround the loss, and find a way to accept that the landscape of your life has changed.