The more you grieve the loss of someone the more fully you get to have them

When someone close passes or leaves, it can feel like a hole that’s too big to be filled.

Indeed, there’s no way to replace someone who is gone forever. However, when we’re in a relationship with someone, all we have is our experience or our impression of them.

And that experience is not a physical thing. It’s a  living, breathing part of you.

For example, when we say "you’re in my heart” that’s exactly what we mean.

It’s true that if they’re gone we don’t get to have the physical experience of them anymore. But we get to keep our impression of them. And in  a way, that can help you feel like they’re never really gone.

What might be keeping you from feeling that is your unprocessed grief.

The more loss you experience in your life, which can start early on in your life (as early as birth!), the more grief you accumulate.

And then, each new loss triggers all the losses from before.

This might be why experiencing a new loss can make you feel like you’ll never be able to recover.

Each loss is an opportunity to process all of your previous losses, as well as the current one.

The more you allow yourself to feel your sadness and let the grief move through your body, the more you’ll see all the great ways the missing person affected your life, and the more you’ll get to have them fully.

When I want to help someone process grief, I often invite them to recount a positive memory of the other person and then make space for that memory in their body. The tears are almost always sure to follow.

It’s an empowering way to process grief because the grieving person gets to notice how their life has been enriched by the missing person’s presence and still get to move all the emotions through the body.

A lot of people do this intuitively in memorial services and funerals, but because there’s a limited socially acceptable timeframe to grieve, we don’t get to fully process the grief.

And, it can be hard for others to contain grief because it triggers all their own losses, too.