Shaped and Formed
Recently, I met a lovely woman named Estella, who gave me a unique picture of what grief looks like. After losing her husband, she said it felt like “landing in Jello.” Her words created a vivid image of the jelly-like concoction that wiggles and moves when you touch it. Looking at Jello a little closer there are parallels that are similar to grief.
Jello is without structure and messy. Jello has elements of fluidity and motion. There is no stability in Jello. In considering the texture and consistency, it is defined by what holds it: it is form-fitted to the container where it resides. It takes a unique shape over time. It’s a process.
Grief enters our lives as an undefined, wordless state. We’ve entered an unknown experience. It begins to reconfigure our lives. Our grief is unique and individual to each of us and will change over time. C. S. Lewis described grief in his book, A Grief Observed; “I thought I could describe a state; make a map of sorrow. Sorrow, however, turns out to be not a state but a process.”
Earlier this year, I took an online course with Dr. Mary Francis O’Connor, author of the book
“The Grieving Brain: The Surprising Science of How We Learn from Love and Loss. She explains that grief is different from grieving. Here’s a summary of her definition:
1. Grief is a wave, a single point in time.
2. Grief is a human emotion with awareness of the loss years later.
3. Grieving is a process and changes over time.
Her main point is, “Grief doesn’t end, but grief will change over time as we go through the grieving process.”
Given the distinction between grief and grieving is helpful as a way to understand where we are in our process. We don’t stay where we started. Grieving, like Jello, takes shape as we move through, not get over our loss.