Part 1: Finding Words

Conversations About Grief for Grief Awareness Month

I’ve been fortunate to receive several referrals recently and I consider each one an honor.

There's something deeply caring about saying to someone, "I think this person might be able to help." It reflects trust, compassion, and hope.

I’ve been reflecting on these initial consultations and I’ve noticed a pattern.

When I ask what brought them to the consult call, almost every one of them responded with a variation of:

"I'm not really sure why they referred me to you."
Or "I don't quite know how to even talk about this."

These people were all great communicators and each had a different story.

One was preparing to lose a brother, who was also his best friend, to cancer.

Another was disoriented after the sudden loss of her husband.

Someone else was caring for a father with dementia after unexpectedly losing her mother. She had no idea that her Dad wasn’t capable of living independently.

When I asked, they could all describe the diagnosis, the timeline, the phone call, specific details of the events. Sharing what happened came easily to them. But finding words for what was happening inside them was much harder.

Grief changes us.

And because it changes us, our language often lags behind our experience.

I think that’s what so many of these conversations are really about.

Author and podcast host, John Onwuchekwa, offers a beautiful way to think about grief. I first heard it when I attended a grief retreat he and Meghan Riordhan Jarvis facilitated at Kripalu.

“Maybe it’s more helpful for us not to think of grief as a journey that we finish. Maybe it’s more helpful for us to think of grief as a language, and the goal of language is not to finish, it’s to become more fluent.”
~ John Onwuchekwa, griefisalanguage.com​

His words felt both relatable and powerful. It has stayed with me and influenced my work with clients.

What if grief isn’t something we believe we must finish?
(Honestly, I know it isn't something I even want to finish.)

What if it’s something we slowly learn to speak?

I love supporting grievers as a coach and companion. One of the privileges of this work is watching people slowly find words they didn't have during our first conversation. I get to watch as finding language brings people relief. It helps them better understand themselves and communicate with the people they love and work with.

What can be helpful to know as you learn your own grief language?

You don’t owe anyone the entire story.
We don’t owe anyone information we don’t want to share. With losses I’ve experienced in recent years, it has helped to have a brief response ready (and practiced) for when someone asks a question that feels intrusive; or when I’m not in the mood for discussion; or when it just doesn’t feel safe to open up. I often help clients craft something too.

Brief and true answers are enough.
​When “How are you?” feels like too big of a question… A
simple response could be: “I’m taking it one hour at a time. Right now I’m feeling quiet.”

“I don’t have the words yet.” is a complete sentence!

You never have to justify why you’re grieving.
There is no right way to grieve and no specific timeline that is “normal” or acceptable.
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Every profound loss may ask something new of us.

We've never lost this person before. We've never lived this version of our lives before. So it's not surprising that we don't know how to talk about it at first.

Most new clients will start out with a statement that sounds almost apologetic.
They say something like: "I don't know how to explain what's happening to me."

By the end of our time together, they haven't finished or solved their grief. There isn’t a finish line. But they've often found a few more words than they had when we started.

Maybe that's what learning the language of grief looks like.

Not speaking it perfectly; just becoming a bit more fluent than we were yesterday.

I've come to believe that most of us don't struggle with how we explain what happened. We struggle to find words for who we're becoming because of what happened.

Let’s try giving ourselves permission not to always have the right words. Finding even a few can be part of learning a language we didn’t know we would need.

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​This is the first of three Grief Awareness Month essays about communicating through grief. In Part 2, I'll turn the conversation around: What do we say when someone we care about is grieving and we don't know what to say?