Telling Our Stories

 

Again … and Again

 

We tell our story of grief over and over because we want to understand this thing that has taken our loved one away and rerouted our lives. As we live through the months and years, new insights and details we've forgotten show up, so we revise our story and tell it again. 

 

In each retelling, new words and images show up that we didn’t expect.

 

How we tell our story depends upon who is listening. Some people only want the facts; others want the feelings. Some will ask questions that encourage us to go deeper and dive beneath the details into the places that are hard to face, where we are vulnerable, and if we look at them as honestly as we can, this can lead to the meaning and understanding that we’ve been searching for. We add in this new material, revise our story, and tell it again.

 

            Each aspect of grief is a leaf on the tree of our being.

 

As we listen to others tell their stories of grief, we realize there are a few areas we overlooked. We revise our story, and tell it again.

 

We hear a piece of music, see a painting, watch a modern dance, and each of them reveal something new about our grief, like a facet of a jewel being turned in the sun. Sometimes our emotions only be expressed in non-verbal ways. Sometimes the body understands what the mind does not. Sometimes grief is only a color. Sometimes it’s a spare piano song that pulls our heart out and wraps it in a big hug

 

            Every emotion of grief is a different color in our crayon box. Use them all when you draw the story of your life.

 

We walk around town, and go into nature, looking for an image that captures our grief, and we take a photograph. We have a print made and hang it on our wall to guide our daily reflections on grief. This will be replaced by a new photograph each week.

 

            We tell our stories to hear what we think.

 

We try on different forms of writing like pieces of clothing. This is my grief as a poem, as a fictional story, as a play. The voices and images that show up expand our vocabulary. 

 

Grief is a story that does not end because we do not cease to grieve. It’s a love story because to speak about grief is also to speak of the love that we shared with our person. We do not cease to love them.

 

Grief is not the end of our story. Love is, because love was there at the beginning.