I always ask people who are grieving: “How would they want you to grieve the loss of them?”

Your loved one loved you. I am confident that they would wish you a grief with as little pain and as few sad days as reasonably possible. They would want you to focus on their life remembering the happy days that you shared, while still acknowledging but not focusing on the last days or minutes of their life when they died.

The path that your lost loved one would choose for you will always be simpler and more direct than the path that you will choose for yourself. Please consider following what you believe their advice would be.

Let me ask you to respect what you believe that they would want you to do in grieving this loss, and to dig a bit deeper into the thoughts that they would want you to carry and share about them, the things that you will teach others about the love that you shared with this loved one who departed. In this way, your grief will quickly come to express and reflect their soul, to remind you and others of why you loved them. This is part of the distillation of grief, where we begin to decide on the collection of memories and lessons that we will condense and then carry with us through our lives.

Importantly, this process of letting the deceased help to guide you through grief is responsible and respectful. Seeking this guidance is the first thing that their life will help shape for you after their death. You may get a sense of things to do, like a regular gathering of friends, a charity that they supported that you will now support in memory, a volunteer activity where their absence will leave a hole that you can fill. These are all positive activities that will continue to connect you to their spirit, to their love of life, and to others who have loved them.

Don’t be in too much of a rush, grief is a marathon that will wear you down. It’s easy to take on too much, then feel guilty when you can’t do it all and drop an activity. The last thing you want to do in grief is to disappoint yourself, and doing too much too soon can become as damaging as doing nothing. Take on only what won’t overwhelm you, only what you can feel a connection to, and only what makes you feel better for the time you spend doing it.

We they part of a foursome with you that played golf weekly? Book and pay for the foursome and the three still living members take alternate shots on the fourth ball. Every time I hit a tree and it bounces out onto the fairway, it’s my late friend Homer who gets credit for the lucky bounce and to this day I say “Thank you Homer”. It’s not a grand gesture, just a million tiny gestures of memory that enhance the joy that Homer shared with his friends on the golf course. “Thanks Homer” evokes a laugh and then we talk about Homer sharing the joy of having known him.

Hosting a dinner? Set a plate for your missing friend, ask everyone to write a simple quick memory that reflects that person you loved and leave it on the plate, to be read at the end of dinner. Dessert for the soul and an opening of the emotional gates that we want to keep open. Hopefully some cleansing tears, some laughs, and a whole lot of warmth.

If we create and organize opportunities for shared memories, we begin to structure our grief as something to be shared with others who loved this person. Sure there will be emotions and tears, but bringing those wonderful memories to the surface of the complicated soup that we need to distill adds value to our journey.

The real process we are starting here is one of including the ones we have lost in our daily lives. Admittedly that’s uncomfortable at first, but the more we do it the more we share memories and lessons from a good life that we have loved. Why would we bury those memories and lessons that were so valuable to us? How can we best carry and share the important value of that life with others close to us? Legacy is a word that fits what we are doing here, we are shaping and building a lasting legacy distilled from the finest parts of this person that we have loved.

Legacy is a primary responsibility of those who grieve lost loved ones, both building it and maintaining it. Everyone who has lived and loved deserves a well distilled legacy.

I am a strong  proponent of keeping a journal when grieving. Paper or digital is not important, convenience and accessibility is. I hope to convince you to journal the journey through grief that brought you to this book.

Months ago I was writing what became this post, alone at dawn by a quiet poolside on vacation, on an iPad using the Notes app. I can access it anytime, from anywhere. It is convenient, secure, available, free and accessible. I can email the notes to myself for inclusion in this blog or the eBook I am writing, or cut and paste a small part of it to offer to someone who is struggling with grief. In twenty-three years I have written hundreds of thousands of words. Some of the better collected thoughts will be in this blog or eBook, the ones that stick to people’s ribs and are requested again and again.

A well used journal that documents your feelings and emotions as you travel the paths of grief will give you points of reference that can help you judge progress. Keep a to do list on a note, another note could be questions you can’t answer but want to, a sort of spiritual to-do list as well as the mechanics of the process of grief like funerals, estate issues, etc.

If my experience is a benchmark, most of what you write will never be read, but it will remain a wealth of knowledge and experience that is  available if and when needed. Expect the early days to be full of darkness and despair, and a gradual lightening of the load and mood over time would be a normal expectation. Sometimes, reading the old dark stuff is uplifting as it highlights how far you have come back towards life. One the other side, a journal can highlight getting stuck in grief and the need to consider professional help before it causes serious harm.

Date your entries, we tend to lose track of time in grief. Days can seem to take weeks to pass and weeks or years later an event can seem like it happened yesterday. Write the latest entry on top of yesterday’s entry, so you can read present to past when you want to review your thoughts or progress.

My late father used to say “You don’t find time, you make it”. The discipline of a daily time to write is important. It might help to set aside specific daily time to journal, more on that later, but a defined time when you are usually alone works best. I am naturally an early riser, so first cup of coffee journaling works well. This will likely be a new behaviour for you , so it may take a few weeks to take root and seem natural. At some point you may naturally stop journaling on a schedule, and that is a positive sign in managing the lessons of grief because you have fewer unanswered or unresolved questions.

Some structure or a template helps get you started. Date the entry and start with “Yesterday was “ and then expand on how yesterday was. Was yesterday hard, was it fulfilling, did something inspire you, was somebody kind to you, or did someone anger or hurt you, did you answer a question or did a new question pop up?

Then “I want today to be “ to begin the next paragraph. With practice it will become natural and the habitual structure will help constructively guide your day’s journey through grief.

If you’re prone to get lost in writing you may need to limit your time writing, but journaling provides a most important safe and private place for you to record a timeline of your thoughts and feelings.

Keep your To Do List (another post coming) separate from your journal. Your journal is for thoughts and emotions, the To Do List is for actions.

It’s never too late to start a journal on grief, and if a death is foreseeable you might consider starting your journal as soon as the inevitable becomes unavoidable.

Humans have evolved uniquely to seek and enjoy relationships based in love. Love is the basis of the formation of society and community. Family is the smallest and oldest unit of love based community. Because I understand that grief is love, for me it follows that grief must have an evolved purpose. If we can believe that grief has some purpose other than painful emotions, our attitude and explorations of grief can be altered in a positive life changing way.

Grief can be a teacher, a journey to wisdom acquired from the pain of loss of a loved one. Admittedly grief can be a harsh teacher, but if we chose to not turn away and instead we seek to learn through grief, we will come back to loving our life more thoroughly and urgently. Those who see grief only as torture will run as quickly as possible from the torturer and likely miss the deeper lessons about love that our evolution has intended for us.

No good life, full of love and happiness, will escape feeling grief from the loss of a loved one or the triggering of grief with our own eventual passing.

Death is universal; it comes eventually to all of us. Yet, even with acceptance that death will be our end, we don’t really teach about grief in school, or even in daily life. Most of us aren’t comfortable speaking openly about love, and grief is the most intense and personal expression of love between two people, so out of our sense of privacy we hesitate to openly share our feelings of love and of grief. My experiences of loss tore down the walls and opened my heart and soul to public view. I became more comfortable speaking of loss and of love in public places and one to one when the opportunity presents itself.

Experience has caused me to reject the stages of grief understanding as a process with an end. I don’t believe that we need to end grief so much as we need to end the pain of grief in a timely fashion so that we may comfortable return to and enrich the rest of our lives with the lessons we have learned. When you become comfortable with purposeful grief, you will be of more value to others who might benefit from hearing of your healing. In my travels on the paths of grief, I have helped others, and I have been helped by others. One of my first signs that I was returning to loving life and those around me again was when I found energy to offer help to someone grieving. If we close down and are unable to share our thoughts on grief, then grief will remain a solitary and frightening experience for most people.

Do not deny the pain of grief. Grief causes pain, the immediate fires of emotions after the death of a loved one are an intensely painful call to action or at least a trigger to harsh reaction. It can be challenging to try to see that pain as purposeful, to see that pain as a call to learn more about yourself and about love, about how you love and why you love. In subsequent posts, I will call you to extinguish the anger in your grief first and offer some insight into methods that have worked for me.

And so, the natural inclination is to run from the pain that grief has caused. This loosely fits the denial form of staged grief. A secondary natural inclination is to be angry because of the pain or disruption that grief brings, which loosely fits the anger form of staged grief. Please note that I accept the stage descriptions as reasonable clinical descriptions of some phases of the complex emotions normally attached to grief, but I reject them as milestones on a way to escape or complete grief. Stages are too simplistic because you can have one foot each of the stages at any given time and the path is never linear. Today, you might be 50% angry, 20% denial, 10% bargaining, etc.

I prefer a self-developed model that allows you the freedom to not label yourself today and to allow your to distill your grief into something smaller, lighter, but more concentrated and pure, more easily carried in daily life. Today, more than twenty years after serious grief first entered my life, I am studying grief as evolved love. This blog of support is a project along my path of lifetime learning about love, some sort of a calling to my soul that is founded in my losses. My study of love will end one day, but the lessons I have learned will have been shared to help others learn about love through grief. I call it part of the answer to why I am here, to what is my purpose in life. Losses, and the grief that followed each loss, have added to my purpose and to my understanding, and I wish to share the thoughts and promote discussions that help promote understanding.

Grief has slapped you hard, I know this because you are here looking for something. I know that you are likely here seeking either meaning from grief, or an escape. I will try to promote meaning and purpose so that you might walk away from your loss with more than you arrived.

I ask you to trust me, to listen to my words and if they resonate, to let me help you to try to find some meaning, some teaching, and some purpose in your grief that will enrich your life and the lives around you by making it more comfortable to speak of lost loved ones and to teach from the experiences and lessons of lost loved ones.

It’s a big ask in the early stages of grief, but if you can accept that your grief is part of your evolution that is meant to teach, you will resent grief less and learn more. 

www.DistillingGrief.com Pinned Blog Post

“Grief is the final responsibility for having loved someone.”

This statement is an underlying theme of my writings and discussions on grief, clearly stating that how we grieve is a responsibility and should respect and reflect how and who we have loved and lost. Grieving responsibly implies that we will love ourselves and those around us who share this loss, consciously minimizing the collateral and ongoing damage to ourselves and to those around us. We do this to best preserve the memories of the love that we have built and shared in life.

Begin with honesty. You did not come here for sport or entertainment. You came here because you feel pain you might not understand, you feel changed in ways you might not want to have changed, you feel different and somehow unsettled. You came here because you have lost a loved one, because you will lose a loved one, or because someone you know is struggling with the grief of losing a loved one. Whatever brought you here is serious business, and potentially hazardous to your physical and mental health as well as your lifestyle. This is challenging territory, and you need to recognize if and when you need more help than you can find here or on other sites or books. 

It is important that you quickly and honestly recognize any leanings towards self harm and if such feelings surface you immediately seek professional help. The same advice applies if your grief become intractable and you feel stuck or overwhelmed or depressed for a period of time that makes you uncomfortable or unable to manage your responsibilities of daily life in a responsible fashion.

Grief Health Basics

Grief is emotional, stressful and physically exhausting, so before we get into it, a few basic physical and mental health suggestions and ground rules are important.

Do you have any pre-existing conditions or illnesses, physical or mental? Even if you feel that you are in good health, a visit to your primary care physician soon after loss would always be a wise choice. Tell them about your loss, and how loss is impacting your daily life. Establishing baselines of blood pressure and other factors that might be of concern will ease your mind and help you to remain healthy and manage risks as you grieve. A heart attack or stroke would complicate your grief and negatively impact the lives of many around you, so we want to responsibly avoid or manage health risks as best we can.

Sleep is essential, so if you are unable to sleep well enough, your doctor can explore solutions that are non-addictive.

Your diet may suffer. It’s common to forget to eat, to eat poorly, to lose interest in basic nutrition, or even to over eat. If you are alone, feeding yourself well can be challenging, so some focus on regular healthy meals is important to maintain and fuel the energy required to grieve.

Care for yourself first, while keeping an eye on those around you who are grieving the same or similar loss. People around you may lean on you, but that leaning may be too much for you to handle while you yourself are grieving. Be honest and open, choose kindness when offering that kindness doesn’t harm you or drag you backwards. Grief never tries to drown one person, guide others but do not attempt to carry them to shore, lest you both drown in grief.

You may be irrational at times, perhaps more prone to bad judgement than usual. These events can trigger events that are more destructive to your life than grief normally might be. A moratorium on major decisions in life is important, so establish a timeline and monitor your own competence to make major decisions.

You might be more prone to substance abuse, and the legal and physical ramifications might last a lifetime and cause more grief to you and to others around you.

Please be responsible and aware of negative changes that might creep into your life. Some people will use grief as a crutch or an excuse, and those behaviours can become lifelong habits that make grief harder and less effective as they may drive people close to you away.

Grief will be a stress test for you and those around you, both emotionally and physically. It is a marathon, not a sprint to a finish. You will lose some friends and gain some more important friends in grief. There will be inevitable social changes that must be incorporated into our lives.

Grief is a teacher not a torturer

We politely avoid talking about grief, yet it is universal to human life. We have a negative connotation of grief. We see it as an affliction, as something we would avoid at all costs, an excruciatingly painful inconvenience.

Grief arrives like a terrorist, throws a wet blanket over us, it takes us hostage, dragging us away from our normal mostly happy life and surrounds us with powerful emotions that are not welcome. The first and most flammable of these emotions is anger, often followed by sadness and perhaps some hopelessness, then the next ten minutes arrive and we feel trapped, and want out. Our instinct is to run away from grief.

Most of us have little understanding of grief, very little experience with it, and we recoil and feel oppressed by the ramifications and inconveniences of the loss that has occurred. Classic models, which I choose to not to be the center of grief, say that grief has a beginning, some number of stages, and a conclusion. This treats grief like a common cold or ear infection, something to be healed. 

I have come to see grief as a highly evolved extension of the uniquely human emotion of love. Grief has purpose, it is a teacher of all things surrounding love. It is a call to action, an opportunity for growth, and yes. it hurts and is challenging. Grief the teacher won’t kill you or destroy your life, it is meant to become a valuable part of your journey.

This blog will highlight my journeys and how I have come to understand and explain love and grief in logical and purposeful ways that encourage us to grow around and incorporate the loss of loved ones into a broader and deeper love of life. I want you to look your grief in the eye, to learn from what you feel, and to concentrate and care for the love that you have shared with others.

Grieving responsibly will shorten the painful times, distilling, enriching and expanding the lessons offered by having loved those that you have lost, and allow you to see purpose in the evolved emotional process that we humans call grief.