good grief

If I had a nickel for every Facebook post and email I'm getting with the tagline "That thing you're feeing is grief"... I'd have maybe two dollars right now. Which, ok, isn't a fortune, but my point is that it's coming up a lot. And everyone else agrees on this, apparently: that thing you're feeling now is grief. But I'm still holding out. Enter Brené Brown's podcast with David Kessler, grief expert and co-author of a book with none other than Elisabeth Kübler-Ross herself.

Spoiler alert: he says it's grief.

"We are all dealing with the collective loss of the world we knew. ... We're feeling so many losses. The loss of physical connection, the loss of routine, the loss of work, the loss of physical touch, the loss of gathering for meals, the loss of gathering for worship...we don't have enough time to count the losses we're experiencing right now, and I don't think we have an awareness of it, and one of the things that people have said is 'well, why do we need to name it grief?' Because if we don't name it, we can't feel it."

Ok so yes, there are losses here. But are we really losing all these things? Or just giving them up temporarily? Is there a difference? Also, is it really true that if you can't name something, you can't feel it? If you can't name it, you can't consciously process it, maybe? What are the consequences for naming an experience incorrectly? Things to contemplate...

Something else I learned from this podcast was that Kübler-Ross's original research was not with people who had lost a loved one - it was with people who were dying. "The five stages of grief" might more accurately be called "the five stages of death." Kessler has added a sixth stage, "meaning," which fills out the stages for people who are grieving in the sense that I always thought the five stages of grief were about.

And even as I grieve my relationship with Christianity, it's hard not to notice that death and finding meaning are exactly what the Easter story is about. So that's another thing to contemplate.

And with that, I'm going to contemplate myself to sleep, good night!