The last few days have been a lesson in grief, with its different moods and flavours. At times it’s shown as knots in my belly, akin to anxiety, almost panic. It’s sat, heavy like lethargy, my brain thick and foggy. It’s driven me to keep doing, keep ticking off tasks as diversion. It’s needed the comfort of company, then needed to run from crowded places, hunting solitude.

We often expect grieving to flow smoothly, from raw shock, through the tidy five stages, disbelief, anger, acceptance and so on. And yet, it’s usually so much more complex than that. Rather than stages, its a tangled knotty old web, impenetrable and unravelling constantly.

Grief can feel so very different for different people, or day to day. It has different flavours following a loss or if anticipating a predicted loss. Add in family dynamics, cultural and spiritual experience, life state and a hundred other complexities and it is no wonder that we often feel at sea without a paddle!

Grief can morph and shift – just when we think we know the shape of it, start to feel our bodies have grown around it, then whoomph, it changes and the edges are sharp, they don’t fit our curves, they irritate, they cut into us. It’s a disorientating confounding time.

It can be hard to know what we need, what will hold our tender heart through these rushes of emotion. It’s tempting to run from them for certain, run from this overwhelming crash of feeling.

Our society doesn’t give space or time or attention to this essential, cathartic healing that grieving needs. Isolation adds to the discombobulation.

We each need to find what soothes us, what allows the grief to flow through us, what helps us to explore, to sit with this overwhelm and still feel safe.

For me, it’s watching the intricacies of nature, the small worlds existing in a few square inches of pond water, or the way a flower unfurls. Something in the noticing of these things, brings me to a headspace where I’m able to notice myself. It stills the chatter to allow the true emotion to be seen.

How is your way?