Exploring Grief
Grief is lonely. Often people don’t know what to say to someone who is grieving and they may withdraw or because they can’t relate to the pain, they may act or talk in ways that make you feel more lonely than ever. Grief is also messy. There is no right way to grieve, no simple process that everyone goes through (like the popular misinformation about “stages of grief”) and no way to “just get through it”. Grief is something every single person will experience at some point in their life as we will all lose those we love. Despite this, every experience of grief is unique to the person grieving and it’s not something anyone truly understands or expects. Look through our page on Grief for more information and words to use to support someone grieving.
How To Grieve
Grief can come from a significant death in your life, the death of someone in your community or the loss of someone in your life through illness, abandonment or other kinds of broken relationships. It can feel like a small hum in the back of your mind or it can feel all-encompassing. As a Wellness Tip from our page on Coping with Grief and Loss says, “Everyone deals with grief differently, there is no right way to grieve. Do what feels best for you – we just hope it involves taking care of yourself”. Grief can be mixed in with many emotions like anger, guilt, loneliness, and even joy. It can feel difficult getting back to “regular” life and it’s not something we often leave behind. There’s an idea that has been growing in the grief community that we don’t move PAST grief, but instead we grow AROUND it. The only right way to act is doing things in your best interest, letting yourself feel when you need to feel and distracting yourself when you need space from those feelings. In the loneliness of it all, it’s important to find ways to remind yourself that you aren’t alone.
Resources to Connect to Others Grieving
YouthGrief.ca is an amazing resource to get in touch with the experiences of other youth grieving. Find advice from other youth, understanding how you might be impacted in school or with people around you and ideas of what grief is like. The Canadian Virtual Hospice developed the resource by gathering a youth development team of more than 30 young people across Canada to add their experience, art and advice. Find “Stuff That Might Help” with advice like planning ahead for hard days and anniversaries, reaching out for help, finding calm with a variety of strategies and letting out your feelings through many different outlets.
While I was looking through the website, in the resources section I found an app, called Apart of Me, that was made by youth in the UK. The app is free to download and use and is filled with beautiful artwork and intentional activities made to help you navigate grief. Travel to a cave to hear other youth’s stories of grief, catch fireflies to understand the emotions you might be experiencing and complete quests to help you learn strategies to cope.
It sucks that you’re experiencing the pain that you are and we hope that you do what’s best for you in this experience. The feelings can come in waves or out of nowhere and we hope you have someone to support you in the downs AND the ups of grief.
The YouthGrief.ca website captures amazing messages of how to support someone grieving. You can share this with those in your life:
“Everyone’s grief is unique. What helps one person may not help another, but there are common themes. Grieving young people want: to be treated as “the same person” as before, with patience and compassion; and someone they can, but don’t have to, share their thoughts and feelings with.”
For more expressions of grief, check out this animated short film called Loss by Bif Naked and this resource about Colouring Through Grief.