The Victorians Thought It Took Two Years to Mourn
And maybe they were right. It certainly seems to take a while to get over the loss of someone, or something, you loved.
But is it absolutely necessary that it take so long?
In One Sense, Mourning May Never Be Done
That is, in the sense that mourning itself is a form of love. When will love ever be done? Hopefully never. In that sense, mourning has a right to live as well. It’s not a bad thing at all. It is love.
But the question comes, “How is it working for you?” If mourning truly feels like love, then there is no problem with it lasting forever. But if mourning feels like pain, then I want to check it out.
I Did The Work for Two Months Straight After My Mom Died
I questioned every stressful thought I could think of related to my mom’s death using the four questions of The Work. And with each step of it, my grief lessened. By the end of two months, I could love my mom again without hurting myself.
All that had happened for me was that I had confused loving and wanting. I loved my mom. But I also wanted my mom. For me, love has the energy of giving, it flows from me outward. Whereas wanting has the energy of neediness, trying to get something.
When I questioned my wants and turned them around, I found that not having what I wanted (my mom alive) was good too in many ways. As I saw this, it allowed my desperateness to drop away. And all that was left was love for her.
That was the end of mourning.
I Invite You to Question Your Wants When You’re Mourning
It may be the death of someone you love. Or it may the death of something you wanted but didn’t get. They’re both forms of mourning. I invite you to identify those wants and to question them.
Who knows, you may find a way to love without hurting yourself sooner than you think. In my experience, the only thing stopping me from love were a bunch of wants.
If you want to write some Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheets related to mourning, you might want to look at my book, Finding the Door to Inquiry: How to Discover a Judge-Your-Neighbor Worksheet in any Situation. Especially the chapter on judging God.
Have a great week,
Todd
“I have a friend who, after doing inquiry sincerely for a number of years, came to understand that the world is a reflection of mind. She was married to a man who was the love of her life, and one day, while they were sitting on their couch, he had a heart attack and died in her arms. After the first shock and the tears, she began looking for grief, and there was none. For weeks she kept looking for grief, because her friends told her that grief was a necessary part of the healing process. And all she felt was completeness: that there was nothing of him that she’d had while he was physically with her that she didn’t have now…” — Byron Katie, Question Your Thinking, Change The World, p. 80.
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