Grief is a language

I saw a video on Instagram the other day that made me tear up so quickly.  In it, John Onwuchekwa talks about how perhaps we need to learn how to speak the language of grief and understand the various dialects of grief. 

 I have spent the last few days thinking about how grief is a language, how we're forced to learn it either through the death of someone but as John says in his talk, there is another dialect of ambiguous grief - where we grieve the loss of a dream, relationship, or the invisible pain of infertility or pregnancy loss.  When there's no physical, tangible loss for people to connect your sadness to, it's often hard for those around us to understand why we're so sad.  This also happens after a certain period of time has gone by and our friends and family don't understand why we're “still” grieving. 

 No one wants to learn how to speak grief, it's exhausting and honestly, maddening.  After years of having to learn to live in the new harsh reality and feeling broken, I learned through lots of therapy that I was learning to speak a new language about my the difficult things that have happened in my life without really thinking about it that way. Now, I know that I have been learning a new vocabulary all along. 

This is also why it’s so important for me to learn about other people’s experiences of grief and teach people about the many different ways people experience grief and understand each other’s grief experiences. This is really the language that grievers share - we can relate to one another, often without even speaking. It’s a heart-connection that brings people together in a club that no one wants to be a part of. But, at this point in my life, I’m grateful to speak my particular grief dialect.