This past year has been so, so hard on so many of us. We have all suffered losses. When I think of the over half a million people in the United States whom have lost a loved one due to COVID, I can’t even begin to fathom the depth of sorrow that is present in the lives of so many after this year that changed all of us in one way or another.

Dear reader, if you are feeling tired, and if you are feeling like you are carrying a load, I have no doubt that you are so fatigued that you don’t even know why you are tired, why you feel like crying, or why you feel like you just want to sit down and never get up again.

Maybe What You Are Feeling Is Grief.

Grief feels tiring.  

• I am tired.

• Grief is tiring.

• Grief is tiring because it is heavy.

Grief feels heavy.

After losses, great or small, one becomes burdened by carrying around heavy thoughts, unresolved problems that seem never to be resolved.

Losses sometimes begin to pile up, one on top of the other.

Grief can make one feel as if one is lugging around a ton of bricks.

I actually have a bag, one of my favorite bags by the way, that has these words imprinted on it:

Schlep

(shlep) schlepped, schlepping, schleps

-verb (used with objects)

1. to carry; move; lug

I’ve been schlepping this bag around all day.

My schlep bag is sturdy, designed as if it were made to schlep around heavy objects all day long. The bag actually has some black scuff marks which are all over the bottom half of the back of the bag. I’ve not been able to wash out those black scuff marks. They now seem woven into the very fabric of the bag.

Those marks are a testament of the bag having been lugged around full of heavy objects. They indelibly marked the bag one day in an airport as the bag filled with heavy items and slung across my suitcase flipped to the backside of the bag on wheels and was dragged on the floor as I raced to catch a flight.

Grief feels like one is schlepping around a load of complex heaviness.

Grief can be complex and that is why it feels so heavy. It is complex because griefs and losses pile on top of each other and before long, one knows that something feels heavy and hard, but one does not even know exactly what it is that causing the feeling of grief, heaviness, and sorrow.

Grief feels like a unidentifiable sadness that makes one want to cry.

Sometimes, I just sense grief as a need to cry and I don’t even know why I want to cry. I will just have days when I want to sit and cry even as the tears will not come. I feel a burning in my eyes, and weariness behind them that makes me just want to close my eyes against the nearly blinding stinging pain of unshed tears. On those days when I won’t give way to tears, perhaps those eyes of mine are saying to me, “Close me. Squeeze me. Let the tears come out!” Maybe my eyes are in touch with my grief even as I won’t let my emotions go there because I’m just to tired to cry.

Let me discuss the word schlep for a minute.

Grief involves schlepping. It involves carrying around heavy things. I think we have already established that premise. Right?

Ok, we agree.

I hope we agree.

I think we can agree.

I’m pretty sure that I have established grief is heavy.

It is so heavy at times.

It can be so hard to carry around.

Grief can be hard to carry because it is heavy.

Grief involves schlepping around heavy things that are hard to carry.

Who wants to schlep around heavy, grief filled feelings all day?

NO ONE WANTS TO DO THAT!

If I’m carrying around a bag of bricks or rocks or books or what ever else weighs a ton, I’m just not going to sling it over my shoulder or my suitcase or drag it along the floor forever. Right? Sooner or later, I’m going to want to lighten my load. Right?

A schlep bag is great, but after a while if I’m dragging it along, it is going to wear out, get a hole in it, or become completely unpresentable for further use.

Back to the word: Schlep. Schlep is a verb. Schlep is a transitive verb. A transitive verb is followed by an object. One must have something to schlep in order to schlep.

Grief feels heavy.

Grief feels like one is schlepping around a bag of bricks.

Grief feels overwhelming and heavy and makes me want to escape from carrying it.

Sometimes, I just want to lay down that bag of grief that I’ve been schlepping around, so I do. (Hint: sometimes things get added to the bag without me knowing it while I think it is just on the floor waiting to be picked up again. Big things, little things, medium weight things, they just keep getting put in the bag unconsciously by me when I don’t want to be bothered by grief.

Grief feels like intrusive.

Grief interrupts, inserts, and keeps on being demanding. Her intrusiveness keeps calling, but sometimes, I just didn’t want to go there, that place where she is. I’ve grieved this and that and now there is some other loss, and that loss has the nerve to demand that I acknowledge its presence in my life.

Honestly, sometimes, I just want to be let off the grief hook.

When a new loss, major or minor, enters my life, I know I need to acknowledge the loss, but I don’t want to!

Grief feels like an uninvited visitor to my life.

The lesson here is that grief, when she makes her unexpected appearance in my life, often brings with her unwelcome emotions, thoughts, and pain that I just don’t want to experience. Grief certainly is not greeted warmly and invited into my life with joy and happiness. I know what she is like. Her heaviness and hard nature can begin to weigh me down, but because I don’t particularly feel open to welcoming her into my already full and complex life, I often think I can just shut the door on her and she will leave me alone.

Grief feels like a presence which must be acknowledged.

Ignore grief. She will go away. Right? She’s knocking and ringing, but I’m not answering. Soon she will leave me alone, right?

Oh dear, I’ve gone from describing grief like an inanimate object, a brick that is heavy, and now I am giving grief human qualities by describing grief as a woman who won’t stop knocking at my door.

Grief, my friends, feels confusing.  

Yes, it is so confusing. Sometimes grief feels like a brick in my bag already filled with bricks that I don’t want. Then grief feels like some unwelcome and uninvited person beating my door down seeking admittance into my life.

I once wrote in my journal after a loss of someone whom I admired greatly and had grown to love dearly even though she was not a close friend. She was one I’d treasured the presence of while she was still on this earth.

I have not completely allowed myself to feel the sorrow welling up inside because grief just doesn’t seem to be something I want to experience right now. Grieving is hard work and it drains. I’m already drained, so I’ll compose myself while my heart skips beats and bottle up my sorrow. I’ll cry tomorrow - when I’m not so tired, so drained, when I can work grieving into that schedule that I don’t even have.

Personal journal entry from March 2019

I’ve probably done this type of “grief work” more often than is healthy for my body, soul, and mind. The “grief work” of ignoring, or putting off, or moving on without really grieving is not really grief work. It is however a way that grief can work on the griever in a way that only compounds the heaviness of grief.

Grief feels like ugly jumbled emotions.

Those bricks of grief that we carry around are feelings, memories, hurts, emotions, losses, gains that are no longer seen as gains. Grief feels like a lot of jumbled up feelings tied in a knot.

Grief feels like ugly emotions that stir up dark feelings seeking light.

Grief shows herself in our tired, tired, hearts, but sometimes, we don’t know who she is. We don’t know her name, nor do we know what she looks like, so we don’t know what to do with her. Perhaps, by God’s grace, we’ve never really known her before.

If that is true for you. If you are tired. If you feel sad. If sorrow seems to be the song that keeps playing in the background as you try to step into the sunshine of a promised new spring, then you might be experiencing grief.

Eleven years ago, when my daughter died by suicide, I immediately booked an appointment with a counselor. Her words that day spelled out the first rules of grieving well: feel your feelings.

Grief makes me feel vulnerable.

It takes courage to identify, name, and feel all of those feelings that grief causes the griever to lug around.

Quite frankly, some of those griefs and sorrows and feelings will never go away, but that does not mean that you will forever lug them all around like heavy loads. The goal here is to feel the feelings and begin to integrate those painful feeling into the fabric of your life.

One must open one’s heart to the vulnerability of the hard, heavy feelings that grief can bring to a life.

No one welcomes the losses of life: the loss of a loved one, the loss of a loved life, a loss of identity, the loss of a loved career, the loss of a job, or the death of a dream. One’s heart does not want to open to such feelings of rage, anger, sorrow, disbelief, confusion. It simply does not. The heart wants to wall off such feelings so that the heart, which is broken, can keep on beating.

Grief feels like a heavy heart.

A heart full of grief is a heavy heart, but it does not have to become a hard heart.

A hardened heart walls off the pain that losses and grief bring. A hardened heart refuses to feel the hurt, does not allow the tears to flow, will not acknowledge how dark, deep, and distasteful the feelings surrounding great loss can signify.

When my daughter died, I did not want a hardened, stiff, broken heart. I wanted a heart that could again be open to love, to laughter, to loss that might come in the future. The thoughts of possibility experiencing even more unspeakable grief lurked around in my mind whispering that I could form a protective coating around my heart so I would never go through this devastating grief again, but I knew that realistically, I could not live life well if I was afraid to enter the arena of life again. I wanted to be able to experience whatever life had for me in the future.

Grief feels courageous.  

I needed, and I still need courage to move through grief, to lay down all those heavy loads, to open up to new unwelcome losses. You may or may not know this. The word courage comes from the Indo-European root word for heart: coeur. The courage to identify and feel the pain of grief involves the heart.

Grief feels vulnerable.

Grief feels like remembering.

Remembering can bring up such feelings of sadness, but remembering also bring up feelings of joy, of hope. Remembering, we connect with times when all seemed right with the world.

Grief feels like mourning.  

Mourning comes from an open heart, a heart willing to receive all that life has to offer. An open heart is able to take in all the feelings, all the vulnerabilities, all the thoughts.

Listening.

Feeling.

Remaining open to all the feelings and lessons of grief lightens the load she brings.

Do your best to welcome her when she comes.

I’ve learned, she won’t weigh you down forever. I promise. She comes and goes. Sit with her when she comes. Cry if you must. I’ve always said that tears are what keep our hearts tender and soft. They water the garden of the soul.

When my daughter died, I vowed her death would not change me. I do not know from what source of ignorance that thought came. In truth, I will never be the same, nor have I been the same since that terrible day. That day a dark like was drawn through the timeline of my life. A heavy, black line was drawn. A demarkation. Time was marked forever: Before. After.

Grief feels like an unknown wilderness that I am still learning to navigate.

I kinda know the landscape of the land of grief.

I’ve been here a while. I’ve been here a decade and a year (almost).

I know where the landmines are. Well, maybe not. I’m sure there are more in this wilderness.

I did not choose to walk this path in the wilderness. It is the path that a mom left behind by a child who dies by suicide walks. My daughter, my dearly loved Julie, would never, ever leave me on this path if she’d known how terrible it would be. She just wouldn’t, but it is where I ended up when she died.

Once, on an early spring day in March of 2010, just a few months before my daughter’s death, she and her sister invited me to go with them on path they followed as they ran together. Because they were running, training for something perhaps, they left me at some juncture so that I could walk as they ran off. Julie, always the protective one, said to me, “Just stay on this path. Keep on walking. We’ll be back, Mom.”

They did come back as they circled around on their well known path. I saw a robin that day and noted its arrival as signal that spring was coming. Little did I know what that spring would bring before it gave way to summer. Little did I know that in just a few short months I would be a path in the great wilderness that grief can bring to a life after such great loss.

Early in my entry into the wilderness of grief, while I was so shocked that Julie would leave me feeling lost and stranded on a path that it seemed she chose for me, I also had a sense that I would survive and even be transformed somehow in the wilderness of grief.

Grief feels transformative.

My heart, while broken, has also been healed by grief. Shattered hearts open up new pathways for light to enter. I have been forever changed by grief.

A heart willing to be open to grief is a heart that while broken is also willing to keep on living life. It is in the living with a heart open to the brokenness of life that one learns that while the burden seems heavy at time, and while the body is tired and just does not want to experience all the deep emotions at times, still this one truth remains:

The transformative work of grief has changed the basic core of who I am as a person. I believe it has made me a better person because I have gained new insight into life. I become a more compassionate person. I hold life with an open hand knowing that everything about it can change in a moment.

This past year has brought new grief to my life, and, no doubt, it has brought new grief and loss into your life too. With each new grief, I believe that we find ourselves in different stages of experiencing grief. We may have moved through a grief that seemed to be our undoing and find ourselves not undone, but in a sense redone.

Then a new grief comes along, and we may say, “I’ve been here before. I know what to do.” Then we find that this grief feels different from anything we experienced before.

We may find ourselves heavy with grief, unable to drag around that bag of bricks, or, we may now recognize the sources of the heaviness we are hauling around with us, or maybe we are unwilling to do the work it takes to discover the reason why a bricks we are carrying feel so heavy.

Grief feels like a learning curve.

Grief always has new things to teach us. I’m learning that.

New grief.

New learning curve.

Dear reader, I’ve been moving through much grief this year. I suspect you have also.

As I have walked through this past year, I have needed to remain silent about the details of that grief in the public arena. I needed space and time to process new griefs.

At times, I felt as if I were schlepping around that proverbial bag of bricks where new bricks got added every day. At other times I knew I needed to cry, but the tears were locked inside of a heart afraid to crack open. Often, I saw others also struggling under a load of grief. Sometimes, I didn’t think I could handle my own grief and enter into theirs too. In time, I have begun to name and unpack all that I’ve been carrying around for what seems like a lifetime. I’m remembering what grief feels like, and I remember that grief does not destroy if you allow her to do her transformative work.

When I look back on 2020, I think I will remember it as the year of the long winter, a winter where much seemed frozen over in the landscape of my inner world. Now, in the beginning months of this new year, I am sensing that shoots of new life are beginning to crop up in many areas of my life.

Now, I’m moving forward into the future with renewed energy and vision. I’ve marked a milestone. I just celebrated a birthday. And I made a discovery that Camus summed up better than I ever could.