Of Tears by Susan L.

  I read a blog post by someone who faced her first Valentines Day without the love of her life beside her. She shared how she wept, how sorry she felt for herself. All I wanted to do was hug her.
  Why do we associate the tears and pain of grief with self-pity?
  As one who has done her own share of grieving over the last ten years, I discovered the truth behind the pain. There's no shame in grieving. Each tear pays honour to the memory of what was loved and lost.
  There's no timeline for grief. The Victorian one-year-to-wear-black has shaped our own cultural beliefs as to how long it should take to recover from a deep and personal loss. That's wrong. Sometimes it takes less. Sometimes it's a lifetime journey. Sometimes healing won't be complete until the day the Lord takes us home.
  I also learned the five stages don't fall in a systematic order.
  Grief is complicated. I often had to revisit a painful event or loss in my life. There were many facets to the impact they had in shaping the woman I was. Each time I grieved, another layer of healing took place. The truth to my identity began to emerge.
  For a while, I was a victim because I needed to be. It helped set me free of the false burden of responsibility which I had taken squarely on my shoulders.
  When I first left my husband, I walked around the bed in a strange bedroom. As the corner of the mattress brushed against my left leg, I automatically looked for my beloved dog, Duke, who always slept on the floor beside me. He wasn't there, of course. I had to leave him behind. A basement was no place for a farm raised 120 pound Shepherd.
  All I wanted at that moment was to wake up from the nightmare my life had become. This simply drove home the fact that my circumstances were real. The mattress triggered an agony of my soul that tears couldn't relieve.
  It was about far more than Duke. The Lord has taken me to that moment time and again as I worked through the countless losses that brief event represented. I was no longer a wife. I was no longer married. I was no longer in my home. I no longer had the future I thought would be there. (It's way better!)
  As I said there have been bouts of self-pity but that, too was part of the healing process. It's only when we allow ourselves to stay a victim that self-pity becomes a toxic emotion.
  "And God will wipe away every tear from their eyes; there shall be no more death, nor sorrow, nor crying. There shall be no more pain, for the former things have passed away." Rev 21:4
  There is one more scripture that helped bless me with the permission to cry, that all I had been through was worth crying about:
  "Jesus wept." Jn 11:35