Grief is Existential

One of the major aspects of grief, as I understand and experience it both in my client work, and personally, is that grief is existential.

And by using the term existential, I mean that the experience of loss and of grieving upturns our life and brings us into a deeper relationship with it, as well as into a deeper relationship with and awareness of death and the finality of death.

For someone we love dies. They were here, part of our life and part of our world, and now they are not here.

We know that they’ve died but knowing that someone is dead and then discovering what it means to go on living without them in the world are two very different things. The first is a fact, and the second is something we come to realise over a long time.

And for me, this is where grief becomes an existential experience.

For grief doesn’t only affect how we feel; it affects our experience day to day of being alive. It confronts us with the brutality and fact of death, with the absence of people and places we love, and the fact that we can’t keep those we love; that just as one day they will die, so too we will die. We might disappear from their life before they disappear from ours.

Loss and grief change our understanding of the world because our world has changed out of all recognition.

Irrevocable change

We talk a great deal about what can be done with grief, how we might understand it. We also talk about processing it and working through it, as if by processing it and working through it we come to an end when we will feel much better, and, who knows, better than we felt before.

We also talk about adjusting to the loss we’re experiencing and coming to terms with what has happened. It’s not always possible to adjust to loss in a complete way, and coming to terms with a loss, particularly where this is difficult for whatever reason, may take many years, not just a few weeks.

So too, the intensity of grief changes. It has its own moods and nuances. It waxes and wanes. It crashes into our ordinary life and recedes from it, allowing us to do our daily work, the ordinary domestic tasks of every day. We find ourselves laughing, interested in things. We make plans again.

Life goes on, radically changed.

The iceberg

And this is where I feel a different question begins to emerge, which is about how grief shapes and informs us as we try to live with it for the rest of our days.
My client work, and my own experience, show me that grief is akin to the proverbial iceberg: we see a certain part of it above the water while its vastness remains deep underwater. The danger comes if we equate the small area of iceberg above water with the full load of grief which now inhabits our life.

As we allow grief to inhabit our life, we become less focused on trying to understand it, as well as to move on from it. We realise too that our grief can’t be undone. Perhaps, over time, we may find ways in which to be less resistant to grief as well as to be less demanding that life should return to how it was before. This is a profoundly painful and gradual realisation.

This painful realisation is not the same as acceptance, for I’ve never been entirely comfortable with that word in relation to grief as it seems to risk diminishing the visceral, life-changing experience it brings to us. How may we coexist with grief as a permanent house-guest: at times unwanted, rude, turbulent, at others, calm, subtle, hidden? Over time grief becomes more deeply woven into us as we recognise its flows, moods, nuances and contours. A stormy, turbulent return of grief doesn’t necessarily mean that we’re going backwards.

There’s a recognition of the existential nature of grief in Maggie O’Farrell’s Hamnet. Agnes doesn’t move through the death of her son Hamnet and emerge on the other side. His death entirely alters the way she lives her life and inhabits the world. Time goes by and what has happened remains rooted within her life.

There may be nothing to do

In the therapy space I recognise the importance of how deeply grief dwells in us, and how this impacts and shapes every part of who we are.

When someone has been grieving for a very long time, the temptation is to look for some quick, easy remedies to help movement, to wonder if the person is stuck at some point in their grief. Have we overlooked something? Have we not worked something through? Is there another way of understanding the person’s loss which might help them?

But I’ve come to realise that grief’s persistence, its permanence in our life, doesn’t mean that we’re stuck, or on the ‘wrong’ track. There may be nothing to change, and everything to live with. This may simply be the way grief is within us for a time, and then, like the tides, it will change.

Biding with grief

At such times, when we might be tempted to see if we can offer a quick remedy of some kind, what is needed is a different and deeper type of attention: to remain fully present with and for our client, to witness their experience without immediately trying to direct it somewhere else.

I describe this as biding.

I bide with them. I stay with them. I don’t force any movement in any one direction.

For not all rivers are seen. Many flow deep underground, shaping the landscape in the darkness. And grief inhabits these depths.

This is why I consider that neither progress nor recovery quite describe what happens through the span of our life with grief. Because there’s something more profound going on, which is simply this: our own relationship with ourselves, with being alive and with the world around us is changing.

For we now know death in a way we didn’t know it before, not as a distant idea or something that happens to other people, because it has entered our life. Our loved one has died.

And we know experientially that the people we love can be here one moment and gone the next. And we experience, full-on, that there are things which aren’t easily repaired and cannot be restored.

In the midst of all this, we discover, little by little, that we can continue to live our life knowing and experiencing all this. Grief becomes part of our ordinary life, a permanent resident, an uninvited house-guest.

But we may also encounter grief in a piece of beautiful music, in a familiar place, at a celebration, or in something we would have loved to tell the person we love, if only… And we do all this without any need to explain it, for we’ve joined the club. We are part of an invisible global club: we become members as we lose the people, pets, places, roles we love.

I recognise that there isn’t a final point at which our grieving becomes complete, when we have finished. It simply becomes part of the ground of our being, of who we are and who we are becoming. This is what I mean when I describe grief as an existential experience.

We’ve been encountered by an experience utterly fundamental to being human: that we love, that we are loved, that we experience loss, that we experience grief, and that our life and the lives of other people we love are finite. We live knowing and experiencing this in myriad ways.

With grief as our permanent house-guest we stumble through all the horrendously difficult, impossible-feeling days, weeks and months because of the love we have for the person, not more, not less than this.