Grieving: facing disappointment

This article, Disappointment — The Neglected Emotion, by Gillian Driscoll begins, "I fired God over a bicycle." Of course, you're going to want to read further (click the title to go there, but come back!).
I myself "fired" prayer when I was 8, when I prayed for my grandfather to be brought back to life, and it didn't happen. It affected my relationship with prayer, and also with God I suspect, for more than thirty years. How we handle our disappointments over smaller things or or early losses may become a key element of grieving our losses, as is confronting the necessary losses that come with changes in our lives, in our families, and at work. If you haven't read Judith Viorst's Necessary Losses, I commend it to you. Her basic premise is that we have to lose in order to grow. Some losses are necessary.

There is some research that shows (I am missing the reference just at the moment) that the quicker or more easily we learn to grieve the better off we will be in old age when we are confronted with grief and loss of friends, family and capabilities so much more often. If we do not learn to grieve we will be overwhelmed as the losses accumulate, and if we don't recognize the impact of our losses, we may be letting some of those losses control our lives.

What old loss or disappointment affects you today? What necessary loss has given you the person you are today?

Grieving: the cycle of loss

Grieving is as complex as each individual. We each must deal with it in the way that works for us. Many of us are familiar with the work of Elizabeth Kübler-Ross, On Death and Dying, and her observations about grief and our reactions to loss; that commonly people experience denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. New research adds another common reaction to that list: a sense of yearning. I think it is important to affirm that these are common, but not required, experiences for a loss, and you may feel these in any order, and with repetitions, although I hope that you do come to acceptance in some way for each loss.

I wrote to a friend a couple of months after her father died, and her mother was feeling particularly down one day, and she herself had been overcome with sadness upon seeing a picture of his gravestone:
"I sometimes think of grief as coming in waves, that the pain/loss, the numbness, the gap/void, the healing and acceptance come and go just like waves on the beach--sometimes one aspect is higher/longer, sometimes another. Sometimes grief sneaks up on you, even after a long time. Sometimes it overwhelms for a while. My father died in April and late that autumn my mother came down with stress related shingles and was very down. It was kind of unexpected at the time, but makes sense in retrospect--summer had been busy and in the fall she and my father used to relax into more together time, and he wasn't there, and the reality of all of what that meant hit her: emotional, financial, companionship, day to day tasks and living. And it was hard for me to hear of my mom going through that. So you and your mother will have waves of grief and healing. It's good that you let yourself sit with it some. Stuffing it away does you no good."

Loss is part of a natural cycle or waves. Can you claim all of the parts of the cycle? As the leaves begin to fall, let yourself be guided through imagining a cycle of loss as if you were a leaf, from "Falling Leaves"-- An Excerpt from May I Have This Dance? An Invitation to Faithful Prayer Throughout the Year by Joyce Rupp.