You will lose someone you can’t live without, and your heart will be badly broken, and the bad news is that you never completely get over the loss of your beloved. But this is also the good news. They live forever in your broken heart that doesn’t seal back up. And you come through. It’s like having a broken leg that never heals perfectly- that still hurts when the weather gets cold, but you learn to dance with the limp.

-Anne Lamott

After every big loss in my own life, I’ve always turned to writing. Even at a young age, in times of loss, I can remember reaching for my journal. As an adult, I still reach for my journal to write about the personal and private things in my life (yes, the “old school” hand written kind). More recently, I’ve made some of my writing more public through my books, blogs and articles.

What do you do to process through your own grief? Does writing help you too? Therapy? Talking with a friend? Something else?

As important as writing is to me, with the hardest losses, I’ve also sought therapy with a grief specialist to process my own grief. This piece is so very important because these big losses change every aspect of your life. It isn’t just that things in the present are up in the air. It also often brings up regrets from the past, and your future now looks completely different than you were expecting it to be before your loss as well.

So, what now?

Before finding clarity, direction and purpose in your life again, you must first do the work of facing your grief and going through all the hard parts of it. Often after the first year, the “grief fog” starts to lift and you can start to see what changes you’d like to make in your life, if any.

What does this look like?

• Some look at their lives after the fog has lifted and they don’t want to change a thing. They are content right where they are and don’t desire to make any changes big or small.
• Other people look at their lives and realize it’s missing something important that they have enjoyed in the past such as a certain hobby, a sport, a friendship that has grown distant, etc. Once they add these things back in, they often feel more fulfilled in their everyday lives.
• Other people realize that the void  in their lives has created space that they’d like to fill with new things such as a new friendship, traveling to new places, taking up a new hobby or sport, etc.

It’s also helpful to have a sense of openness here as well. Openness to face your grief head on. But also an openness that when you are in the right state of mind to take stock of your current situation, you’ll give yourself time and space to figure out what changes need to happen so that you are moving towards your full potential and life purpose once again.