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The Marker Stones of Grief – How Long Should it Last?

Topic: Grief and LossBy Ken MatthiesPublished Recently added

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“HeartSpun Talk from the Crucible of Experience”©

From the life of Ken Matthies - Author, Poet, Real Life Storyteller

Every single person experiencing the pain of grief would like to know that there’s a hard and fast rule that can tell you when you can expect the pain to go away so your life can get back to “normal”.

In the first place, who’s to say what “normal” really is after experiencing a death that’s taken away everything you ever considered to be normal before it happened?

The simple truth is that no hard and fast rule for such a thing exists, although some cultures have “supportive grieving structures” which seek to help define and guide the length of the grieving process for those suffering the pain of loss, grief and bereavement.

Yet as excellent and helpful as these structures are even they cannot govern the private levels or length of grief experienced within the individual human heart – a heart that must therefore find its own way to a grieving and healing length of time that’s right for it alone.

The healing aspects of the grief process are cyclical in nature, often returning you to those places and times in memory where the pain of your loss becomes overwhelming yet again. At times like those you can’t help but question if the pain of it will ever change or end for you.

The answer though is that it definitely will change and become progressively easier to bear as you allow yourself to “lean into the pain of it” to discover your personal healing path. Although the memory of having experienced your loss will never leave you, it’s only as you “lean into” and confront your feelings of loss that you can begin to heal and address the actual length of the grieving process in your life.

Stated another way, the most important thing to know and understand about the length of the grieving process is this – it will be directly proportional to the effort you expend in facing its pain, searching for answers and understanding their new reality in your life, and allowing the healing of the answers discovered this way to soothe and give peace to your broken heart.

The fact that there is no set length of time allotted to the grieving process is a price which grief exacts on us all – yet it is also this fact which allows each person experiencing it’s pain the freedom to determine their own needs of how long it will take to go through it, and to find new life in the shade of its reality.

Rather than ask how long the grieving process will be, allow yourself to understand that healing from grief is in fact a process of time itself – time to endure, time to confront, time to search out answers, time to accept, and time to heal.

Read on in this article series and come to understand the three major cycles of your grief and then allow yourself to take however much time you need. Know that your healing will be fuller and more complete if you set no limits on the time needed for it.

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About the Author

For almost forty years of his life Ken Matthies has been a writer and chronicler of life expressed in poetic form, following the family tradition laid down by his grandfather before him.

Faced with the dramatically life altering experience of his helicopter pilot daughter’s sudden death in 2002 he has grown to also become a literary author of true events based on his own life. Though grief opened his literary doors it is the Light of Love and Memories supplying the fuel of inspiration to write through them.

As a second-chance dad given the opportunity to verbally share his life stories with his newly rediscovered daughter it was she who told him that she believed him to be a ‘worthy man’ after having heard them, and who encouraged him that they should be shared in written form beyond her own life – not yet knowing as she said it that she was soon to leave him behind. As a bereaved father and writer learning how to live life again in the Light of his own Love and Memories of his daughter, he writes those stories now as a testament to her belief and faith in their value.

His full length book entitled "How to Survive the Death of a Child - A Father's Story of Healing Light" was the first of these stories which he wrote in the Light of those Love and Memories.

He lives in the solitude and grandeur of a tiny southern Yukon village with his Tlingit native wife Skoehoeteen and the successor to their venerable old Tahltan bear dog Clancy Underfoot, who now happily awaits them at the Rainbow Bridge in Doggy Heaven. She’s a new female puppy named Hlinukts Seew which means ‘Sweet Rain’ in the Tlingit language, a wonderful phonetic variation in memory of Clancy’s name who was also called C.U. for short. It’s a good place to tell those stories from.

You can read more of Ken's writings and find his Amazon Kindle book at www.kenmatthies.com.

The Marker Stones of Grief – How Long Should it Last?

About the Author

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