The variety of grief

Although I'm generally allergic to self-help books, I have been rummaging in my local libraries for books on grieving, to see if there's anything that's useful. I immediately discovered that grief of course covers a vast multitude of situations beyond bereavement - grief in dealing with the trauma of past abuse, grief over divorce, etc. While there is some similarity, much of the generality doesn't resonate at all. Even with bereavement there are so many possible causes -- accident, illness, murder, suicide -- so many life stages (single, married with no kids, or young kids, or grown up kids) -- and so many possible relationships to the person who has died, that the responses of each person seem so different. Many people talk about anger as a part of grief, and so far that hasn't featured either now or while Jen was alive, unless as part of the reduced patience that comes from being under strain.

Yet the elements of commonality remain. Paul Kelly's song "No you", which is proabably about abandonment or relationship breakup, could easily be about bereavement. To pick out a verse:

I do not lack good companions
To pick a man up when he's down
We go to the track on Saturdays
Spread our money 'round
I go up and down
And every single sound says
No you! No you! No you! No you!
No you, no you, no you!

Or from the song "Night after night" :

I still miss you, whenever I turn out the light,
I still miss you, night after night after night.

But the special aspect of grief in bereavement for me is that it comes from love as well as from loss. The book that's most helped me here has been Nicholas Wolterstorff's "Lament for a Son", about his son Eric who died in a mountain climbing accident at age 25. It's the kind of book where you want to quote the whole work, where if Jen was still alive I'd be reading something out from every page. In the preface he writes: "If he was worth loving, he was worth grieving over. Grief is the existential testimony to the worth of the one loved. That worth abides. So I own my grief. I do not try to put it behind me, to get over it, to forget it.". Or later on "Love in our world is suffering love. Some do not suffer much, though, for they do not love much. Suffering is for the loving. If I hadn't loved him, there wouldn't be this agony".

Yet grief is still as individual as love. Wolterstorff writes "I didn't know how much I loved him until he was gone. Is love like that?". We had the privilege, if you like, to have ten months to face the prospect of Jen dying. I counted that there were 310 days between Jen's first diagnosis and her death, including both of those days. We had time to treasure each other and know how much we loved each other, and we were consciously thankful for each extra day. Not that our love was free from anger, or impatience, or selfishness, but it was still real and solid. The grief we had together before Jen died is different from the grief I have alone now, but both come from love.