Elder Maze: Make positive changes when dealing with grief

Change happens.

When change happens, it brings a mix of loss and gain into our daily lives. We tend to fixate on the losses in our lives. But we can decide to deal with those losses in healthy ways.

Elders and their family members deal with loss nearly every day. The loss may not be as dramatic and lasting as physical death, though the anticipation of death is always present.

An elder may have to give up his car keys. An adult child realizes his mother is no longer able to walk as fast as she did just three weeks ago. You may find your “loss list” is longer than you thought it was, because the losses can happen so gradually.

As an elder experiences each loss, he or she discovers another reason to grieve that loss. As an adult child watches her parent set aside just one more task or one more taken-for-granted ability, she grieves for herself and for her parent.

Well, actually, grief rarely happens that neatly or clinically. Often, we don’t even realize we have any need to grieve. So we too often just stuff our sad feelings away and get on with our daily lives.

Loss is not optional in our lives. Grief isn’t optional either. To stuff grief into a bag to be opened later too often invites unintended consequences – future physical distress, clinical depression, to name a couple.

So what is our choice? For starters, name it and claim it. A close, elder friend – we’ll call him “Tom” – mentioned to me the other day that he was going through an intense time of grieving over the loss of his wife. She died three years ago.

Tom said that he was “basically numb” during the first year after her death. By that, he meant he was able to function and grieve at some level, but the reality of his wife of nearly 60 years being gone hadn’t fully hit him. Now, he was experiencing his loss in deeper ways.

One way he is dealing with this grief, as well as his own physical decline, is the way he and his wife and children always dealt with loss in their lives: healthy humor.

Tom’s face brightened as he spoke of the family pictures in their living room. He chuckled as he told a few family stories. We laughed heartily together as we listened to his favorite comic monologue on CD. He knows something of the power of humor to ease physical and emotional pain, to balance pain with grace.

I later shared with my friend a young girl’s prayer I found in the book “More Holy Humor” by Cal and Rose Samra.

“Now I lay me down to rest. I pray I pass tomorrow’s test. If I should die before I wake, that’s one less test I’ll have to take.”

“I know just how she feels,” Tom said.

As I said earlier, change happens. Sometimes it happens to us, like in our aging bodies. But change can also happen through us.

Grief is certainly the process of mourning what we have lost. But grief also can be the process of gaining a new understanding of life because of what we have lost.

Grief can remind us that we’re healthy when we lose our tendency to self-pity and gain a new appreciation for the relationships that nurture us. Grief can remind us that when we lose our independence we might also gain a depth of interdependence we’ve never allowed ourselves before.

When change happens, grief happens. But it is also true that when grief happens, change happens.

It is up to you whether the change is good.