“What do you do when you are sometimes overcome with grief years after a significant loss and people do say insensitive things to you?” a reader asks.

You try to learn about yourself, about others, from all that happens to you and all the things people say and ask. You try to grow from it. By growth I mean by doing your part to develop a deeper understanding of yourself and others. You challenge yourself to become kinder than you already are even towards insensitive people. You commit developing greater and authentic empathy for others who have also suffered loss and those who will suffer loss but seem not to know it.

How we, you and I, respond, react, and reply to what occurs to us and is said to us reveals what kind of person is living within the deepest recesses of our hearts, minds, souls. Our responses to the actions of others reveals and exposes who we really are. Awareness of what’s within us will hopefully lead you and me to a commitment to the beautiful journey of repeatedly unleashing the kindness and grace living within you and me (and all people) that we may enhance the lives of others in our individual spheres of influence.

Grief after a significant loss is seldom completed.

I believe this to be true for all whose lives are hit by loss, those who are most immediately impacted, and those who are in the wider circle of relatives and friends. Things don’t “go back to normal” and if they appear to, it’s no indication that the grieving period is over or complete. Such appearances can be as necessary as they are deceiving.

In the best of circumstances lives rearrange. Families re-calibrate. Relationships, close and distant, re-align. 

Hearts  – feelings and will to live – and minds  – thinking and planning – can be strengthened. The capacity to re-think a future is possible but such transitions, often expressed as spurts of change and moments of apparent growth are unlikely to be the result of determined planning. They are more likely to occur as a result of desperation, a will to live, a need to survive.

Although it can sound harsh, even cruel, the outsiders’ push for people to “move on” or the repeated sentiment and falsehood that “time heals” are all part of a community’s ache to survive and part of the unwelcome journey of necessary re-calibration and necessary adjustments after significant loss.