Grief is not a monster!

A while back, I heard someone say. "Grief is a monster that sneaks up on you at the most unexpected times." And everybody in the room nodded. I knew what she meant. It's a natural way to talk about something that hurts that much.

But I want to push gently back on it a little. I think calling grief a monster is one of the most dangerous things we can do to ourselves. Grief itself usually isn't what gets us stuck. What gets us stuck is the meaning we give it, the story we tell ourselves about what this pain is. And "monster" is not a good story

A monster is an enemy. Someone you fight, run from, and protect yourself against in any way possible. You spend all your energy trying to make it go away. And when it comes back anyway, and it will, you feel like you lost. Like you failed. Like something is wrong with you because you couldn't kill the thing. So you keep trying and the feelings of failure get deeper and deeper.

Grief doesn't work that way. Grief isn't something that invaded your life from the outside. It's not the enemy. Grief is your body's reaction to a change you did not want and did not ask for. Fighting it means fighting a part of yourself.

So here's the picture I'd offer instead. Grief is a severe injury.

Think about what happens when you tear something badly, or break a leg, or go through a major surgery. At first, the pain is unbearable. Your whole life starts orbiting around it. How you sleep, whether you can work, what you can and can't do on a given day. People ask how you're doing, and the honest answer is: I'm in pain. That's the whole story.

Nobody looks at a person three days after surgery and says, why aren't you over this yet? We understand injuries. We give them time. We expect the pain.

But here's what we also know about injuries. If you take care of them, if you rehab them, if you show up and do the slow, boring, unglamorous work, something starts to happen. The pain doesn't disappear. Your life begins to expand around it. You go back to work. You laugh at something and realize an hour went by where you didn't think about it. The injury stops being the center of the orbit. It's still there. But your life got bigger than it.

That's not the same as being back to normal, by the way. Some injuries change you for good. There's a limp. There's a scar. There's a shoulder that aches when it rains. Grief is like that too. It can come back to haunt you, on an anniversary, in a grocery store aisle, in a song you weren't ready for. Sometimes it flattens you all over again for a day. And you are, in some real way, forever changed by it.

But it is never quite as bad, and never as constant, as it was when the injury first happened. That's the part we forget when we're in the early days of it, when the pain is still everything.

And notice what the injury picture asks of you that the monster picture doesn't. You don't fight an injury. You don't run from it. You tend to it. You're patient with it. You do your rehab even on the days you don't want to. You treat yourself like someone who is hurt, not someone who is haunted.

Because here's where we come back to what I said at the start. It's not the grief that gets us stuck. It's the meaning we attach to it. It's the story we tell ourselves about it. If the story is "there's a monster in my house and I can't make it leave," then every wave of pain is proof that you're losing. But if the story is "I've been badly injured and I'm growing around it," then every wave of pain is just pain. It's real, it hurts, and it makes sense.

Same grief. Different story. Completely different life.

So if you're carrying a loss right now, I'm not going to tell you it stops hurting. I'm telling you it's not a monster. You're not haunted. You're hurt. And hurt people, when they tend to the wound and put in the work, grow. Not back to who they were. But into someone who can carry it, and still have a life that keeps getting bigger around it.