Viewing entries tagged
grief
While every person’s experience of grief is unique and the process of healing is seldom neat or straightforward, I felt the steps that I had heard that day were ones I wanted to hold onto and seek God for the strength to take when my turn eventually comes.
More and more people are choosing direct cremation without any kind of ceremony to mark the passing from life to death. It’s like we want to maintain the illusion of invincibility and don’t want anything to ruin the dream. Even when we do have funerals, the goal seems be all about celebration without any recognition that death is our “enemy” (1 Corinthians 15:26) and that the passing of our loved one is a painful separation. By failing to mourn, the pain of grief remains unresolved and can lead to deeper issues down the road. A funeral doesn’t bring closure to a mourner’s grief, but it does create what Dr. Wolfelt call a “meaningful beginning” where healing can begin. To do that, he says that funerals should seek to accomplish six things. Let me explain them.
When it comes to helping a grieving friend, nobody wants to say the wrong thing. Nobody wants to make it worse. And the fact is that almost nobody feels confident in navigating such delicate issues. I want to share some of the things I learned from Roslyn Crichton’s booklet, “How to Help Grieving People.”
You can’t short-circuit the process of grief and mourning. To get to the other side, you have to go through it. Otherwise, grief has a way of following you.
