The Faces of Grief

After cremation services in College Park, MD, you will face the grief of losing your loved one head-on. At first, it will be intense and pervasive, but you will find that grief has many different faces, and even those faces change as you go through the journey.

Sometimes external events are triggers for our grief and our memories as we travel through the grief process. For example, early in grieving, everything that even remotely reminds you of your loved one is probably going to evoke a strong emotional reaction.

But as time goes on, you may find that grief comes in different forms. Instead of life being bad because your loved one has died, you may find that you have good days with bad moments. Or you may find that you have a not-so-great day and someone shares a memory of your loved one and you find it comforting. And, then you may have those seemingly irrational moments when just the smallest – and sometimes, odd – things that remind you of your loved one bring on a complete meltdown.

You may not realize that grief is cumulative. Not all the grief that you experience will be because someone died. As humans, we suffer losses of various kinds throughout our lives and they produce grief.

You may have lost a pet when you were very young or you tried to save a wounded animal and it died. You may have missed an important school event or you weren’t chosen for a sport or activity that you wanted to be involved in. You may have not gotten into the college you wanted to go to or get the scholarship offer you expected.

You may have had to move far away from your family to pursue your education or career and you rarely see them now. You may have gotten married and then divorced. You may have wanted to get married, but it just never happened. You may have been passed over for a promotion at work or you changed jobs and discovered you hated your new job, but you couldn’t go back to your old job because it had been filled.

All of these are examples of losses. All of these – and more – cause you to experience some type of grief. The losses add up and so does the load of grief.

However, there are sometimes in your life where the losses come one right after another, instead of being spaced out by months or years. When this happens, as it has for many people during 2020 as the COVID-19 pandemic continues without abatement, you literally get overwhelmed.

You find it nearly impossible to put two thoughts that make any sense together. You may find yourself feeling exhausted when you wake up in the morning. You may find that it’s hard for you to focus on anything and that you continually feel distracted and disjointed.

All of that is grief from losses that have piled up on top of each other. Not all of these losses are because you had a loved one die, but they all cause you to grieve more intensely.

If this describes what you’re experiencing, you are not alone. If you’re able to get some professional grief counseling, now would be a good time to take advantage of that. It won’t remove your grief, but professional counseling can help you find strategies for coping with it better so that you’re not feeling so overwhelmed all the time.

If you want more information about grief resources and cremation services offered in College Park, MD, you can talk with our expert staff at Donald V. Borgwardt Funeral Home, P.A.