The journey of grief is not neat, organized nor defined in linear stages.  Grief is chaotic, messy and all over the place.  Just when you think you have completed that stage and emotion, something triggers and you go swirling around in your grief.

Grief has no rules except that you need to grieve.  Grief is the price of love.  When we love deeply, we will grieve deeply.  No right or wrong way to grieve.  You just grieve in ways that are natural to you.  Give yourself permission to grieve.  When you deny that you have a loss, it will come out in others ways in your life either physically or emotionally.

The journey of grief also has no end mark.  Grief never ends, but it changes.  We learn to live with our grief, not get over our grief.  We never stop loving.  Love just takes on a different form as we walk the journey.  We move forward with life and grief becomes a part of our lives.  We will continue having moments of intense pain and sorrow as we journey, but we learn to live in those moments and know the intensity is for a moment.

As we grieve, we recognize our grief affects all of our other relationships.  Sometimes it is difficult to let others close to us again out of fear of loving and losing someone else we loved.  Our journey can become one of isolation and fear.  We may become irritated at others for not understanding our grief and shut down and quit sharing.  These are unhealthy for our relationships.

On this journey of grief, we need to be honest with ourselves and others.  Be truthful when grief feels overwhelming.  Find people who understand and provide support and comfort and do not try to “fix” you or gloss over your feelings.

As you begin the grief journey, the picture in your mind and heart is the last day memories.  The dying process for your loved one may have been slow and you watched your loved one go through the letting go process.  It may have been peaceful and quiet or painful and loud.  Either way, you continue to relive these dying moments.  The death may have been sudden and unexpected, tragic and intense.  You may not have been present but you relive the moment you found out – that place, time and picture remains in your mind constantly.

The journey involves the process of replacing these images of death or the moment of finding out about the death, with the pictures of how your loved one lived life.  It is remembering how your loved one lived, not how they died.  This is a gradual process on the journey.  It is like replacing the photo of death with the many pictures of the joy and good of your loved one’s life.

Part of the journey of grief is letting go of the “why” questions because there are not answers that will satisfy and bring back your loved one.  The question becomes, “Now that this has happened, how do I journey through my grief and figure out my different life?”

This journey of grief is a journey in figuring out who you are now.  Life is different and you are different.  You will always have a hole in your heart where your loved one lived, but your loved one is just with you in a different form.  You have loved and will always love.

Keep walking the journey.  You have been given life.  The journey has a lot of ups and downs, curves, mountains and valleys.  Remember, it is a journey, not a destination.  You do not stay but move through and forward with the grief.