Gifts that Grief can Give

Gifts can come alongside grief. It’s taken time through my own grieving journey to understand all that I’ve actually gained, through loss.

There is incredible pain through grief. Enduring the early days, weeks, and months is not easy. Grief continually crops up through moments that easily produce a lump in your throat or trigger the deep sense of loss. In many ways, it saddles up alongside us forever. Despite that, the passage of time thankfully allows us to reap the hardest-won rewards of a grieving journey. We can start to lay down what it has taken away from us to more fully appreciate what it can give back.

Gifts that can come with grief:

• Patience

  • Grief gifts us patience, particularly with our own feelings. Early on, I would try and rush through and quickly fix or at least shove down my feelings of anxiety or angst. Grief is not comfortable, it hurts and it’s painful, and I didn’t want to feel any of those things. Because of trying to skip over all those, I often suffered from a short attention span, I was easily distracted, and feelings of worry and sadness overwhelmed me. Through support groups, therapy, and guidance from those who had been in my shoes, I learned the importance of being patient with myself (and others). I learned to accept those feelings as they were, and sit or walk with them for awhile. I eventually recognized that those feelings would come, and they would go. It took practice not to avoid and rush through the uncomfortable, and I still work on it. The gift of patience through grief, beyond a stronger sense of calm and healing, is one that has spilled over to more fully experience all emotions, which means happiness and joy too.

• Kindness

  • My mother has always taught us to “lead with love.” It’s been used as a mantra of sorts through hardships in our family. Grief gifts you an incredible, newfound sense to easily forgo judgement of others because we now know that we can’t fully understand what they have been through. Grief brings new perspective on what is important, and what isn’t. There is a deeper sense of empathy for others that comes alongside our own loss. Kindness comes easier, and it is a gift that grief gives us.

• Strength

  • A good friend had sent me a greeting card quoting Bob Marley, “You never know how strong you are until being strong is your only choice.” Grief oftentimes comes our way because the unimaginable happened, and we find ourselves living in a situation we didn’t expect, or certainly didn’t wish to happen. There are times that we have no other option than to dig deep and flex an inner strength we didn’t even know we had. So not only do we discover we were stronger than we knew, we continue to gain strength through the journey. I’m not implying a grieving person always needs to be strong, because some days that tank is empty, and that’s OK as we rely on those around us. However, grief gifts us the ability to uncover the unfailing strength to get through something we never thought we could.

Years ago, I wouldn’t have thought that grief could have given me anything but sleepless nights, overwhelming pain, and a sense loss. However, perhaps one of the most healing parts of this journey is acknowledging and accepting all that grief can actually give back, and being able to share the patience, kindness, and strength with others.