How to Honor Your Grief
When you’re grieving, it can be helpful to honor the person you lost. There are many ways to do so, from what is physical and tangible to that which is digital and virtual. Some examples are acts of kindness at or with charities that were important to the person you lost, planting a tree in their honor, or creating a digital memorial. I find myself feeling appreciation for the many times I approach a park bench and see an engraving or plaque attached, honoring someone who made a difference in that geographical area.
Honoring a loved one helps with your grieving process. It’s an act of mourning that may help with accepting their death and shifting thoughts towards life moving forward. In addition to helping with your own grief, it helps create a legacy for your loved one, and that can feel really good too.
In the grieving process, honoring a loved one isn’t the only thing you can honor. You can also honor your grief. It may sound weird or uncommon but it’s also something known to help with the healing process.
What does it mean to honor your grief?
When you think about honoring a loved one, you essentially are doing something to show your love and respect for them. Can the same type of thing happen to honor your own grief?
The word honor means to “recognize the value of” and “respect.” Grief may make you feel something I call grief duality: struggling with the way you feel and also sensing that what you’re experiencing needs to happen. I’ve also heard of this being called ‘tending’ to your grief. You may be told to hold space for it but it causes so much pain so you may find it confusing or unmeaningful to give it respectful attention and honor it.
My mentor, Dr. Alan Wolfelt has stated “To honor your grief is not self-destructive or harmful, it is courageous and life-giving.” Honoring your grief is counter intuitive and isn’t something taught in most grief support related programs. Because it’s very uncommon, I agree with Dr. Wolfelt that it is a courageous act. I can understand the resistance you may feel to recognize value and respect something that can feel so painful.
When you honor your grief, you are respecting it as an important part of your life. I believe that grief shows up as a teacher in times of hopelessness and despair. It’s a teacher of many things. Not in the sense of being academic and there is knowledge to be generated. I mean more in a sense that is Holistic: physical, emotional, mental, spiritual, and social. Grief helps you understand some things about your being that you previously may have never considered.
Honoring your grief is paying attention to it as a part of you that has a purpose and a point to it. It’s also listening to it, feeling it, and expressing it. Instead of dismissing or numbing grief, honoring it may be an important thing in helping make what feels unbearable more bearable.
How Can Honoring Your Grief Help?
There are theories that when your heart breaks, it can be physical and physiological just as much as it can be emotional and metaphorical. If your grief remains unattended and dishonored, it may become a source of heart aches or more serious physical body related problems.
As you learn ways to honor your grief, you may come to understand some of the ways that it can open pathways to healing in your heart and soul. Honoring your grief may actually help you mourn more effectively and come to a place of peace and acceptance for your loss.
Honoring your grief is also a way to show self-love and respect. In my own experience, feeling the depths of despair opened me to ways of better caring for myself and loving myself more unconditionally.
When you honor your grief, you create a sanctuary for your healing. Internally, you establish a safe place to feel the authentic arrangement of emotions and gain a deeper understanding of what your grief experience means as you move forward in life. Healing is a journey of navigating through darkness and light. As is grief.
How to Honor Your Grief
In the Companioning work I do, I often ask clients “If your grief had a voice, what would it say?” I find the exercise to surprise people because it’s a perspective of grief that is not normally thought about. But it is a perspective that honors grief, and that’s why I ask the question. My intention is to help someone see their own grief as something that does have a voice. Even within yourself, one part of you may need to express an aspect of your grief and another part of you may need to witness it.
Parts of you? Yes, parts of you. Human makeup is complex. Just as complex as grief. There are parts of you (in your psyche) that have louder voices when encountering different life events. For example, are you a confident person? If you answered yes, the confident part of you will speak up in times of uncertainty. “I can do this!” may be a normal response to several different situations.
When grief needs to speak inside of you, it may be from a vulnerable or timid part. If your tendency is to ignore or suppress vulnerability, you may shut down or cut off that part of yourself from speaking. When grieving, you will have to prevent yourself from doing so. Your conscious mind will have to allow (or hold space) for the timid, vulnerable part of your grief to speak.
In order to honor your grief, it’s also advisable to slow things down. You have to give it room to be heard. You also have to believe that as painful as it may feel, grief has significance in your life.
I’m a proponent of nature for grief and healing. Nature provides a sanctuary where stillness and movement can coexist at the same time. I’ve had the experience that when in nature, and without mobile technology, no matter where I go or what I do, I can sort through grief related thoughts and feelings without distraction or the pressure to perform or to achieve.
How can you honor your grief? There are numerous ways to do so. Remember that even in the honoring of your loved one, it is possible to honor your grief at the same time. Below are a few suggestions to honor your grief.
Start a tradition. There are many new things you can do to comfort your grief. The point is that whatever you start, it’s important to find it comforting and not dreadful. For example, at Thanksgiving time, my wife and I place photos of deceased relatives on our mantle. We keep them up until the new year. We love the tradition. We find it to be comforting in the feeling of staying connected to family during the holidays.
Sit in sacred silence. As I mentioned earlier about slowing things down to honor your grief, I also advocate for moments of silence when you’re alone. In moments of silence intended to honor your grief, there’s a sense of sacredness and the feeling is quite comforting. I’m fortunate to be able to do this along the Pacific coast but even if you’re surrounded by land, you can sit in sacred silence at a local park or along the banks of a river near you. Many people in the Grief Refuge community have stated how healing it was for them to sit in sacred silence near flowing water.
Write your grief. You may already be doing this but you might not be giving yourself credit for it. Many people think of writing as something that must be prolific, like finishing a memoir or filling handfuls of pages in a journal each day. This is great but any person grieving doesn’t have to hold this expectation of themselves. Writing your grief can be really simple. You can write two bullet points on a post it note, keeping tallies for some of your feelings and thoughts. You could also write a letter to your loved one or write from their perspective to yourself.
The possibilities are endless, and similar to grief itself, there’s no right or wrong way to write about it. The hope is that you do something. Write anything that feels comforting. Write in any way, shape, form, or style that supports your healing and honors your grief. You never know what may come up. There could be an insight or awareness that could be exactly what you need for healing.
What comes up for you as a way to honor your grief? Hopefully, this article has helped spark some ideas for you. If you are still unsure of what may help, please don’t hesitate to reach out and ask.
In summary, you have read about honoring your grief: what it means, how it can help, and how to do it. It’s an important part of your healing process that can provide comfort in your grief. Please do your best to slow things down and make time to honor your grief. Respecting grief as something important in your life moving forward may be the needed form of self-love and compassion to help you through it.
Reid Peterson is the Creator of the Grief Refuge app. Grief Refuge is a daily companion to help support people on the grief journey. Download Grief Refuge for free on iOS or Android to get started.
