The Hurting Time: how long does grief last?

'To everything there is a purpose,

To every blade of grass,

And every leaf on every tree.

Every living thing will surely come to pass,

And what will be, will be.

That's when the hurting times begins.'

(Annie Lennox, The Hurting Time)

How poignant are Annie Lennox's lyrics? Every living thing will come to pass, and that's when the hurting time begins. But what so many of our clients want to know is 'when does the hurting time end?'. In this blog we examine this question so often asked of us.

It might be supposed that clients ask this question, not out of curiosity or convenience, but rather as a way of expressing that the pain they are currently experiencing feels unsustainable. They are asking how much more they can be expected to withstand. Embedded in the question too, might be the notion of 'when will I feel like myself again?'. Let's start perhaps with asking a question of you: what did you imagine grief would be like before it happened to you? An initial feeling of intense pain, which over the following few weeks - maybe months - lessened gradually, and allowed you to carry on with your life? The shock of losing someone we love is often compounded by the realisation that grief feels quite unlike anything we have ever experienced. It is an emotional response to the breaking of a loving connection, and with its intensity comes the disquieting realisation that it is simply too profound and too powerful to be paying us a fleeting visit.

Would you like some concrete answers to the question of 'how long does grief last?'. A search on Google shows that between the national grief charities, the experts on grief, and grief blog sites, the answers range from 'you'll start to feel better after 6 months' to 'around two years' to 'forever - you will grieve for that person forever'. So, that's quite some discrepancy, but what is probably at play here is differing meanings of grief. This instructive article from 'What's Your Grief' makes the distinction between acute grief and integrated grief, and this is relevant to the question in hand. Acute grief describes the early days of loss when your thoughts are dominated by grief, to the exclusion of all else. Integrated grief is when you have found a way to accommodate the loss into your life. Integration does not mean the grief is over, but that it has settled within you, albeit in a way that can readily be returned to with the arrival of significant dates, memories, music, smells....In this sense, integrated grief may then last forever, you may spend the rest of your life wishing you could pick up the phone and still call your Mum. This however, might be distinguished from the acute pain we feel in the early days of loss. Whilst these first few weeks are disorientating and overwhelming, we are at least usually expecting them to be so, and at this point our support networks may be close to hand, and our employers willing to accommodate time off from work. It is perhaps then our transition from acute to integrated grief that can feel frustratingly slow.

What might affect the length of time it takes? At Sussex Bereavement Services, one of the cornerstones of our work is tailoring grief support for our clients. We do this because we understand the uniqueness of grief, so it would be remiss of us not to note some of factors that can influence the longevity of grief. Our grief so often simply reflects our depth of love, and the love we feel for a child, or our parter of 50 years may be the greatest of our lives. Therefore, inevitably, there are some losses that are felt more profoundly than others - and these are very personal to you. Whilst a 90 year old Grandmother passing away in her sleep may be accommodated quickly by some, for others, this may be the person that raised them and gave them a meaningful life when their Mother died during childhood. Beyond our relationship with the deceased, so many other factors influence our ability to accommodate loss into our lives: our age, their age, circumstances of their death, our physical health, our mental health, previous losses and whether we grieved well at the time, our support network - and many more beyond these.

Perhaps then we can begin to see that there is no timetable for grief, because there are no rules and no two experiences of grief are the same. Progression isn't linear, we cannot select an end point on a timeline and say "there, that point there is where I stopped grieving, I remember it well. It was a Tuesday in May". We may find that we have had several months of feeling slightly better, leading us to imagine we are on an upward trajectory, only to find that we feel enveloped in our grief again when a minor setback happens in our life. If integrated grief is the goal, we might consider Elisabeth Kübler-Ross' thoughts on this stage of grief. She makes the important point that accepting, or integrating grief into our life does not mean we are alright with what has happened. However, she notes that some of the later aspects of healing can only happen when we have accepted the loss. We can, for example often only find a way to have a continued relationship with the person we have lost when we accept the reality of the situation. In this way, Kübler-Ross suggests that acceptance brings us closer to the person we have loved, not further away. This may be such a valuable idea to hold onto as you make your way towards integrating grief into your life. The joy of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross' writing is that she shows us where there is opportunity for us to consider ideas that may help us. Of course these endeavours are hard, and they do inevitably take time, but if we resist moving toward acceptance, we are potentially using our precious resources on rumination, guilt, anger or denial. Our physical and emotional energy might better be used to steer us toward the readjustment and reorganisation of our life - whilst we fully accept this is not the life you wanted, nor asked for. As much as our heart's desire it be so, time will inevitably show us that we cannot keep the past intact.

So, maybe we haven't given you a straight answer to the question of time, but that is probably because we can't. What we can tell you is that time, in-and-of-itself is not always a great healer. Rather, it is what you choose to do with that time that can be restorative and help you find a way to accommodate grief into your life. Share your thoughts with others, talk of the person you love and miss so much, journal your feelings, seek professional bereavement support, read some of the wonderful books out there on grief, join a support group....and please remember that Caroline and I send you our warmest regards, always.