Among emotions, grief is one of the most complex and unpredictable. Because grief is fundamentally love that has suddenly been injured and unilaterally redefined, grief is almost completely unpredictable when viewed by others. In the next few posts I will present my explanatory model for how we collect, process and share love, a model of our invisible metaphysical organ, the human soul.

No one loves grief, because grief suddenly steals some of, much of, or all of the love we carry in our soul from us. This emptiness makes us feel hollow and fearful that we might never be able to replace that love  we have lost from someone dying. I will try to model and explain how the love from that person remains among us, and that that love becomes a shared responsibility for those who loved that person.

I am a technician by nature, so it is natural that I try to build a model of what I am trying to understand. Models are simply simulations where we can functionally test inputs and reactions without complete understanding of the systems that we might not yet understand, or perhaps we will never understand how they work but want to know how they respond and function. To be functional, models need some fidelity with real life reactions. Humans are the most complex organic machines in the universe. We are highly evolved mobile chemical super computers and motion systems powered by self contained chemical plants that refine the food we eat into energy and waste. We will never completely understand how we function, perhaps we are not meant to, but we can observe how we react and how we learn, how we are drawn to some things and repelled by others

As a technical male, I was probably much less spiritual and understanding of what we call our soul and of love, than the average person. Certainly, men are generally challenged by talking about what we don’t fully grasp, and that includes both love and grief.

Grief was a great awakening in my life, right into the middle of a parent’s worst nightmare. The very public grief of our son’s death stripped me of all of my layers of protective armour and thrust my naked soul in front of TV cameras and a caring community that we had raised our family in. I became an open book, and I began to see things differently in myself that I had never let myself see, or perhaps lacked the vision to see.

In my journeys of grief, I felt a need for a simpler but somehow deeper and more universal understanding of love. Life and religions tell us to love, but what exactly does that mean? People speak of souls, but the existence of a soul is impossible to prove in the physical world, we can’t see or touch a soul to understand if it is wounded, we have only evidence of the primal pain that grief brings to us.

Grief is not a specifically religious experience, but grief is a universal part of all religions who try to explain loss or give life some purpose. For some, faith sufficiently answers the unanswerable questions and is a suitable guide through grief. Me. the technician, needed a model more than I needed a parable, but my model does not conflict with the religious concepts of a soul, it coexists with them.

It took a long journey through my grief to find happiness again, but that now happy journey continues and has made me more appreciative of love, more open in love, and more urgent about sharing love. While the journey has likely made me less religious in the sense of organized religions, it has made me far more spiritual than I would have ever imagined.

One of the great things about love is flexibility and creativity. We each define what love means to us, what language our love will speak with each person we share love with, and how we will collect, process and share love with others. The challenge is often that love happens so naturally, we believe that love is simple and requires little of no input or guidance from our conscious life and so we rarely come to more fully understand it. I now see love as a conscious choice that we allow and enable, in each and every part of our lives, with significant subconscious management that we probably have little control over.

Much of the complexity of grief is that there are so many intertwined and often tangled forms of love in the relationship we had, and so many inputs and outputs and other people’s love connected to our love for a person, our love for life, and our love for ourselves. Humans cease to emulate mechanical or logical systems whenever we deal with emotions. Emotions have far too many dimensions for a human to grasp, and emotions when destabilized are too complex to allow us to predict how any one person will process and react to the real world inputs that are part of daily life.

Grief involves more than one person, grief is a community event shared by all of the people who have loved that one who has died. This renders grief impossible to predict, and hard to fit into a single path of healing. Grief is as individual as your fingerprint, yours is unique while being similar to all those who will grieve this loss.

My model centers on visualizing our invisible soul, where I believe we process, store and share the love we connect to in life. Our soul is the only place where we process love, and the only nourishment a soul needs is love. My model will then define love as a life force energy that we need to maintain our soul and live a good and happy life that we love living.

I created this visualized model to help me understand my feelings through grief, and it may provide a basis which will help you find methods to distill the spirit of your loved one, and to discard or ignore those parts of grief that cause ongoing pain or unwanted distraction. This will simplify and concentrate your memories of a lost loved one, and you will be able to speak and teach from that love, not without emotion, but the goal is easily accessible memories for a lifetime without pain that keeps you away from accessing and sharing those memories.

Because the human soul cannot be seen, or imaged using technology, we can safely say that the soul does not exist in our physical world. That said, we have solid evidence of both the human soul and of love, in the feelings of both love and loss of a loved one.

If I use them word metaphysical to explain the soul, many will misinterpret what I trying to say as mysticism. I explain that I believe that human soul is real, and that it is physically dimensionless. From my perspective, the entire purpose of the human soul is love. Our souls survive and grow on only love. Your soul collects and shares love, and also selectively accepts love that is shared with you.

We are each born with an empty soul. In the early days of our lives, parents and family provide the immediate love that fills our new soul to a level of comfort and happiness. We learn to seek love, to feel love, and to give love. Our soul has no limits on its expansion or its contraction.

As we grow up, we begin to find our own passions and expand our sources to find love and to share love. Our souls grow and shrink, much like a heartbeat. Love of learning, love of activities, love of community and friends, and love of self create many opportunities to form connections which enable the flows of love to and from our souls.

As we become adults, we begin to share love between two people. When we love someone, we extend a connection of love to their soul, and they do the same to our soul. We each chose how much love to share. If the relationship grows in purpose, the sharing of love grows, if either side stops sharing love, the connections slowly wither and die, because love needs flows of energy in both directions. As love deepens we begin to build a shared soul that will become our family’s soul. When we have children, we attach their souls to our own soul, as well as to our families soul, and the very private connections between two lovers continue to flow love as well.

Our souls are reservoirs of the love that we have gathered in our lives. From that reservoir, we gift love to other humans that we choose to share our love with. Some of those gifts of our love are lasting connections where love flows in both directions, constantly or intermittently depending on the relationship. The pathways of this exchange of love are what grief damages and disrupts. The emotions we feel in grief will be directly connected to the intensity and severity, the breadth and depth of the love that we have shared with that person we have loved.

Next up, I will do my best to define love in a way that makes grief more understandable. See: https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/25/what-is-love/

Until then, spend some time pondering your soul and looking for cracks and leaks that are caused by everyday life and by singular damaging events. Those leaks can pile up and make it impossible to love your life at this point in time. Repairing that damage is our goal.

Be well and peaceful, build love in your life and the lies around you daily. Love is life. 

Anger is a cancer of the human soul that consumes love. Anger is natural first response in early grief, and anger can become a habit or a crutch, so anger should be your early primary focus in healing grief. The process I will outline here is applicable outside of grief and works whenever you have a build up of anger in your life.

The fires of anger cause the initial painful emotional response when we lose a loved one, and those fires and the resulting pain draw our attention from gathering the ingredients of the love we shared to distill into our grief. If we include anger in our memories, they will have a bitter taste and harsh feel that will eventually find it’s way into every corner of your life, every memory after loss.

Fortunately, anger is volatile and if we focus on it, anger can be distilled and condensed into discarded waste without losing significant parts of the primary essence of our lost loved one. However, the longer we allow anger to guide our grief, the more damage we do the the collection of love that we wish to distill and hold for our lifetime.

The first step is to identify the few or many things that are making you angry. Set up an anger page in your journal, or better yet grab a stack of 3”x5” cards in a specific colour, perhaps pink. When you feel anger, identify the source of it and write it down. One point of anger per card. Rate the anger from 1 (lowest) to 10 (highest).

Identify the specific targets of your anger, and include anger at yourself where applicable. I say this because it is easy to become angry at yourself while grieving, a process that erodes your sense of self-worth and consumes self-love that is critical to refilling your soul with love.

It would be possible to do this exercise on a spreadsheet, as I did, but for this exercise you may prefer hard copy. When we distill a point of anger into waste that we will symbolically discard, bury or burn, we will tear the card up and keep the pieces in a resealable bag for a more formal disposal later when most or all of our anger is resolved.

As your stack of anger cards grows or shrinks, periodically add the currently unresolved anger ratings for a total anger score which you will track on a separate card, with a date for each entry. This anger score should be updated each time you add another anger card, or each time you tear one up. This will help you see whether your cumulative anger is growing or diminishing. You can also revise, either reduce or increase the 0-10 anger score on any card, simply date the change, with a note why and date and update the total anger score on the tracking card.

It would be idealistic and wrong of me to suggest that you will eliminate all anger from any loss of a loved one. More important is to understand whether your anger is diminishing (constructive) or increasing (destructive), and at what level of anger you feel better about your daily life. As lower anger allows you to laugh or smile more, you may be inspired to work on and resolve more of the anger that holds you back.

At least once per week, review the stack of anger cards and pick the ones you feel able to work on this week. Make some notes on each card, dated with actions you will take. Perhaps you need more information, note how you will get that information , who you will speak to. It’s natural in this process to pick the easy ones first, but you should ensure that you have at least one (or more) of the cards with the highest anger scores to work on.

The physical deck of anger cards also has great purpose if and when you decide to seek professional help in your grief, or in attending groups helping those grieving. What you seek from therapy is tools to resolve these points of anger. Taking your stack of anger tracking cards make this process easier to prioritize.

Because most of what makes you angry in grief cannot be changed, the eventual conclusion for most points will be that there is nothing more to be done to change these things that are making you angry. For these components of anger related to your grief, you will eventually need to work through this point enough to finally resolve to accept that nothing constructive can be done about this point and carrying this anger any longer than necessary will only hurt you more on your journey through life.

Most anger can be resolved to disappointment, which is anger without the destructive fires of cancer that consumes love. Disappointment is a benign scar on your soul left by anger that you have completely healed to acceptance, and we should welcome the change from anger to disappointment.

The stack of anger cards is something that helps you quantify your anger at each point in your grief. At some point, if you do the work on your anger, the stack will become insignificant in size and anger will no longer impede or threaten your healing process.

More on forgiveness later, but please understand that forgiveness is probably the most efficient anger reducer we have. We forgive to free ourselves of the anger, more than we forgive to free someone from responsibility. Your forgiveness in grief may reach as far as forgiving the Universe for its chaos that brings us random losses, or as specific as forgiving the person or persons who directly caused the death of a loved one. In the challenge of suicide, we must forgive the victim for choosing to cause their own death. 

Be well, seek peace, extinguish anger so that you can rebuild love in your life and love for your life. 

I am in it now, a fitting season. I have, for the past 18 years had a natural annual period of introspection that begins on March 22, which is our son James’ birthday, and ends sometime soon after June 6, which is the day that James died in 2005 at age twenty. I am different during this period, not better, not worse, but just different.

This period provides important things to my soul, an annual reset where I back away from other things just a bit to give myself room to be sad, room to be pensive or quiet, room to explore how grief has changed me, and this year room to finally launch an introspective retrospective on grief with this blog and pending free eBook.

In the aftermath of the death of a child, we are defined primarily by the loss. The rest of what we think or do remains in the shadow that we are “those parents”. People treat us differently, social contacts are fewer and different.  Fewer invites to happy gatherings, people are reticent to include us because they don’t know how we will react, will we make the party sad, and mostly I believe that they just don’t know how they will react. This is mainly a function of people not knowing how to confront speaking of our loss with us. Many are compassionately afraid to hurt us at a time when we can’t possibly be more hurt, and their silence often redefines friendships past as either shallow and fragile or deep enough to survive and change as we do.

We are still married, but the divorce rate for couples who lose a child is statistically astronomical. Especially in a marriage, we need both time and space to process and adapt to our own grief, to understand how this will shape us and shape our views on life, and our spouse is having the same struggle. In the early days and years, we can’t possibly describe or pin down those changes, we are being swept away from our past selves by grief. Over time, we make more and more room for ourselves, and also for our relationships with other people. Couples will need to fall in love again, with this survivor who has changed dramatically as you changed dramatically. And we must make room for two different sets of explanations and reactions to the same death. 

Each person grieving a loss has had a different experience with that person that they have loved. Each person will manage and react differently in grief. Making that space to allow multiple perspectives and changes is critical to keeping lovers and friends together when the grieve.

Each year, I look at how I have changed in the past year. This is probably a normal part of aging, but for me it includes wondering how James would feel about how his death has impacted my life. The reality is that I have become more like the 20 year old James than I have ever been. James’ morals and ethics were reflections of our teachings and guidance as parents, and since he has died I have assumed much more of the idealism of a 20 year old than I had as a 52 year old father when I lost a son.

Life prior to James’ death had worn away much of my idealism, a phenomena common to most people. I have become more active and vocal politically than at any time in my life prior to James’ death. Fitting because his accidental death was avoidable and the causes were rooted in bad management by a municipality.

Governments mostly kill by oversight and omission, which is a breach of the trust we place in the governments that we elect. My political views had always been centrist, fiscally responsible social democracy. My present views are similar, but much harder on the concept of responsibility, social, environmental and fiscal. This change is the result of my pondering how James would have wanted his world to be governed.

The foundation we set up in the aftermath of James’ death has awarded annual scholarships since he died. In the past year, a group of James’ friends, now established in their 30’s, with families of their own, have taken complete charge of the foundation and are expanding the scope and purpose, as well as the fundraising. It’s a wonderful healing process for them, for the community, and also for us. It’s natural to set up a memorial foundation, but the fear of the foundation dying is palpable, so we have passed the responsibility to others who will carry it forward in his name and in the process enrich the community that raised James by their active and constructive involvement.

Always the question is: Have I done enough ? Never, but I am satisfied at what has been done, and that I am finding time and energy to write and share. Perhaps I can help others reach this point of comfort with loss faster than I have, because looking back I flailed for a long time as I sought tools, explanations, and new purpose.

The great challenge in presenting this annual few months as introspection is that it seems like I am seeking sympathy, or feeling sorry for myself. Sympathy without understanding is pity, and pity has negative value to those grieving because it makes it about us. It’s hard not to make a statement about loss without attracting condolences. 

So, this is now a period of marveling at the power of a 20 year old son’s death to continue to change people for the better, including me, his father. It is a period of amazement at the power of love to carry on, to hold individuals responsible and engaged, to continue to set teachable examples. This is what life after death is all about, because in hundreds of minds, love for James is still guiding people who loved James.

It is also a period of marveling at my soul’s ability to limp through grief, to heal, to recover from a the worst of a series of harsh and untimely losses.

Mostly that has happened by getting out of the way of myself and providing a flow of love to my soul so it can heal itself. We must let our soul resolve the pain of grief, and it only needs us to find the energy of love in things we love about life and things we will love about life and in the people we love in life. Then, we need to let the healing happen by accepting that we are being changed by grief, by our own good soul which will have our best interests at the center of that healing. The thing that extends the pain of grief is mostly that we fight the inevitability of change that this loss will cause us.

Another part of my introspection is to look at how I will teach those who will grieve me, how to efficiently and comfortably grieve the eventual loss of me, how not to fear grief. This is not morbid or self serving, it is caring about my loved ones and looking for ways to make their journey through grief more easily understood and less unexpected. This book should help them, so I will continue to work on it.

I am comfortable that I have grieved responsibly and productively and at every point have minimized the damage to myself and to those that I love, and that love includes the memory of James. The pull of these few months annually cannot be resisted, it cannot be ignored, and each year it seems simpler and affects my daily life less, but in no way diminishes the memory of James. This is exactly how I imagine that James would want me to grieve him, comfortably never forgetting to be guided by his memory.

Simply put, James followed in my footsteps until he died one day. Since his death, I follow imaginary footsteps that I believe that James would have made had he lived. The father guided the son, now the enduring spirit or important parts of the son guides the father. We shall travel together in this way, at least until I die, hopefully long into the future.

The death of a child is not the end of a parent’s life, but it is the beginning of a different and much changed life that will be shaped and guided by what you distill from the grief you feel.

Enough about me, in the coming posts, I will start providing some tools and especially some fundamental understanding of love and how we heal loss.

Be well and peaceful. never stop building love in your life and the lives around you., because love is life.

Long before I came to experience and better understand grief, I came to this, my personal understanding of how to make major and minor decisions, or confront situations in life: In the end, you have only three choices: Ignore, Change, or Accept. As a father, this was part of what came to be called Dadvice.

Ignore

Ignore is the most passive option, easy because it requires no action, but the one with the greatest risk over the long term. When we ignore something, it’s the equivalent of putting the weight of the decision into a backpack that we must carry throughout our life. We become heavier every time we avoid a decision when we’re prone to ignoring. The weight of ignored issues grows to the point of discomfort and if we do enough ignoring we eventually collapse. When we collapse, we spill our emotional backpack of all the decisions we have ignored around us. Our immediate reaction will be to be overwhelmed with the magnitude of the decisions we should resolve, which may be depressing to us. Alternatively, some of us will walk away and never deal with those issues that have spilled out. Most of us will re-stuff the backpack and drag ourselves onward. That cycle of loading the emotional backpack, collapsing, reloading and moving on will repeat time and again. If we walk away, as we look back we will see piles of ignored issues left behind in our wake. These abandoned piles will become the basis for regrets as we look back on our lives.

Change

Change is the most productive choice, because if we change something it will likely never be an issue again. Our goal through change is to resolve the problem to a point of understanding where we simply deal with it and similar future problems without worrying or thinking too much. When we learn to change, we can come to the same or similar problem in the future knowing how we want to deal with it, so we have less distraction and worry when problems repeat. Change takes work, change risks failure, and we can’t change some things that we would like to. So, change requires realism and an analysis of whether or not this problem can be changed, and then consideration of the best way to change it. More work, more thought, but you very constructively bring positive change to your life when you resolve problems with change.

Accept

Accept is the final choice. What you can’t change, and can’t ignore, you will need to work to accept. Acceptance simplifies things, but acceptance requires the most work. Often we look at acceptance negatively, as failure, as something that was forced on us, something that we tried to change but couldn’t, we worked hard to change and failed. So, acceptance often involves some measure of resignation, some component that life has perhaps beaten you unfairly.

Grief is an unfair opponent in this process, because most of grief can’t be changed, most of grief will force you to accept, and this happens at a time when you are emotionally under duress and very likely in the mood to fight change or acceptance. Spending precious energy on things we can’t possibly change or ignore is exhausting and has disappointing results. We know that logically, but our anger at feeling powerless often drives the process we go through.

I tell everyone new to grief that you must accept that grief will change you, the sooner you accept this the easier your journey will become. You may want your old “normal” life back, but grief will change you and you will need to accept those changes as inevitable so that you can guide them in the best possible direction for the rest of your life. Quite possibly, grief will teach you that some parts of your life before grief were those things bin your backpack, the extra weight that you carry in your life daily.

Once you understand and accept that grief must change you, that changing through grief is inevitable, then you can pick and choose some of the changes that grief brings, and learn to comfortably accept the ones that can’t be changed. We must be very cautious about what we try to ignore in grief, because ignored grief is relentless hunter of the love you carry in your own soul.

We loved a person, they have died. We can’t change that fact, we can’t ignore it because it has happened, so we must simply accept the death of a loved one. The honesty of that acceptance will free you to explore more of the positives of the love that you have shared in life with this person.

So, in the distillation of grief, I ask you to add honesty to the mix, the honesty that the life we have lost is far too important to ignore, the death is real and impossible to change, and so we must accept that we will be changed by this loss and try to make those changes as positive as possible.

Be well, seek peace, and accept that grief will change you.

Please read this first distillation of grief one line at a time, pausing to close your eyes, to seek understanding of the personal meaning of that line within your current feelings. At any point in grief or just on daily life, revisit this first page and refresh your understanding. This is the most simplistic form of my distillation of grief, I will present variations for different specific situations that I have come to understand in my journeys.

A simple universal distillation of grief

• We grieve because we love.
• No Love, no grief.
• Deep love, deep and complicated grief.
• When we love someone, it is always possible that they might die before we die.
• The person we have loved has died.
• Our love for them doesn’t die.
• Our love for them isn’t meant to die.
• Grief is love continued after the death of one we have loved.
• Grief is the final responsibility for loving someone.

Love is the basis for every relationship that we will grieve, so love will be the key ingredient we seek in your distillation of your grief from loss.

What we seek is not so much your love for them, you are alive and have all of that already.

We need to explore and understand what you will miss about them, what was in the love that they gave you, and we find is the essence of their love for life, their love for you, the activities and interests that they loved in life and shared with you.

These are the essence of why you loved them, the many parts of their life that connected you to them emotionally, the parts of them that you will miss the most if you don’t carry them with you. These are the things we will distill and carry with us. We will discard the pain and the anger and carry only the love that we received from our lost loved one.

Sometimes we forget that we who are left to grieve are the lucky ones, and so we often make grief about us, about our pain that the loss has caused us, about how hard it will be to live without them.

We are the lucky ones because we live, we can and will remember, we can and will share the memories and lessons that they no longer can.

We who grieve have the honour of the responsibility to continue to love someone who has passed, and that it is we are the lucky ones. 

You don’t need to be grieving to come to blogs, websites and books about grief. Often people will come to places like this because the they want to help others who are grieving. Getting some basic understanding of grief as a normal and unavoidable part of daily life will make your life seem easier,

The evolved emotion of grief that is not attached to death is a normal part of our daily lives. The better we become at grieving small and medium sized losses, the better we will be prepared to manage the major grief that life will eventually bring to us when we lose loved ones. 

A challenge is that we hesitate to call many parts of daily life grief without someone dying. I think that’s because we are conditioned to feel weak or vulnerable when we call it grief for simple parts of life. In my interpretation, grief is simply an evolved processing of love lost, a process that heals our soul and makes us stronger by repairing the cracks that life adds to our souls, but also by making us wiser by teaching us about loss so that we can avoid it where we can.

The loss of a relationship with a loved one is an example of grief without death. Our first breakup in life often leaves us broken and scarred because we lack the tools to effectively process the pain into wisdom and knowledge, a process that takes experience. Divorce is right behind death of a loved on on the challenge scale. Friends who part ways or move away from each other will each grieve the loss differently.

We will grieve loss of autonomy as we confront illness or injury, whether thru genetics, disease, or accident. The ski hill was the place that I felt most at home on this Earth, a place of great joy. But age and a minor ski accident with major implications of a dislocated and damaged shoulder makes it unwise for me to ski. The consequences of another simple fall would be far more damaging than the longing to feel the mountain and harness the forces of gravity into joy. So, I have grieved the loss of skiing and can visit the memories of the many years of mountains conquered without longing for more.

The loss of a beloved pet is a common  example of a valuable teachable experience of love, grief and the reality that life is finite. Often the loss of a pet consumes people for a time. One of the few times I saw my father cry in his life was after we had to euthanize an aging and sick beloved Old English Sheepdog. His love was real, his grief was real.

We can also grieve the loss of material things, the destruction of a car that we really liked in an accident. I consider it lust when the object of our grief is inanimate, but lust is close enough to love for us to borrow the grieving process we use for love of others.

Often we grieve as a result of our own mistakes, a bad investment where we have lost money is a common example. A career change, forced or chosen, triggers grief for the old job and fears and insecurity for the new job.

Any change that affects our daily lives will trigger some amount of grief. How we teach ourselves to deal with those losses is often how we will grieve the loss if loved ones. 

All this simply to normalize grief as a part of our daily lives, and to encourage those who have not yet grieved the loss of a loved one to come to better understand their personal process of grief. If you become better at processing grief in your daily life, you will find more peace and less angst, you will become more confident and feel stronger and better prepared when you need to grieve something of a larger scale.

The distillation of grief in our daily lives is one of the many ways that we acquire knowledge from experience. If we understand a mistake that brought us grief, we can choose to avoid similar mistakes in our future. But, if we walk away from the mistakes of hurts of daily life without acquiring the understanding to avoid them, then our lives will be filled with more similar mistakes. We often call that type of person a train wreck, because when the go off the rails the collection of unresolved past mistakes all go off the rails in the same time and place and the mess left behind is much bigger.

Regrets are heavy things, and most regrets are things in our lives that we have partially grieved without completion. We have suffered the pain and not acquired the understanding. You can process the losses that cause you to carry regrets through life at any time. Often we pretend that something doesn’t bother us enough to be bothered with it, but then it keeps circling past. Regrets are like vultures circling your life, waiting for you to be weak and wounded to come rip another piece of your soul.

A great purpose for seeking knowledge about the process of grief is that you will better understand and be better able to support those around you who are grieving. 

I could go on forever, but the last one is that sometimes you need an example of someone who has suffered a loss that you consider significant and has come back to loving their life. There are many who have lost more than I have and healed. I wish that they would write or speak more, because grief is love and love is life itself. 

Be well, seek peace with your losses and build love in your life and those around you each day.

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.