Why grief is so hard?

            Grief is such a heavy and complex emotion to deal with that some many people prefer to push under the rug.  For a lot of us, grief is a pretty unfamiliar feeling to deal with. While most of us have experienced loss and grief before, it is typically few and far between.  This unfamiliarity with grief makes it that much harder and difficult to deal with.  The heaviness of grief can sometimes be reframed as a beautiful thing because it is a testament to how much the person you lost meant to you.  If there is no grief after a loss, it can sometimes be sad that it is not there.  Trying to reframe it in this way can hopefully help you get to acceptance more easily and quickly. 

            Another difficult component to grief is the fact that it fluctuates and never really goes away completely.  The stages of grief that are experienced are: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Your feelings will fluctuate as you go through these stages and you will likely experience them in a variety of order.  Also, even after getting to acceptance, you could go back to a previously experienced stage.  For example, if you are at a place of acceptance with your grief and then an important date of the person you lost comes up, such as a birthday, you might go back into depression. 

            Grief can be really difficult in that it sometimes causes us to ask more existential and heavy questions.  When we lose someone, we naturally think about how life is short, which can be really difficult to deal with.  A lot of those types of questions never have an actual answer, which can make them even more confusing and harder to deal with.  If you can accept that you will not reach certain answers on those questions that can help you heal from your grief more quickly.  As you deal with those kinds of questions, it can feel very isolating and like no one understands what you are going through.  That isolation type of feeling can make grief even heavier and harder to deal with.