“You cannot ‘get over’ possibly a lifetime of love in a few days. Grief deserves its time.”
“Closure” is often spoken of as the ultimate goal of the grieving process, a firm indicator that you’ve accepted the death of a loved one and are ready to move on.
But many grief counselors say the rush to “get over” our grief or get to the other side of it is counterproductive.
Jennifer Kaluzny, a rabbi at Temple Israel in West Bloomfield, Michigan, is among them.
“I am a big believer that we don’t ‘get over’ the death of someone we love but rather we ‘get through,’” Kaluzny told HuffPost. “Getting over, to me, has the negative connotation of leaving someone behind.”
“After moving through the initial white hot grief, you slowly learn to live with your loved one in your heart and soul instead of in your arms or on the other end of the phone,” she explained.
Still, it’s understandable that we gravitate toward the idea of closure, said Kelsey Crowe, a therapist and the CEO of Empathy Bootcamp, a company that offers courses on empathy intelligence. Closure suggests that grief is no longer ruling or consuming your life, which would be unhealthy.
But closure also presumes that grief is no longer a part of your life, she told HuffPost. What we have to do is find a way to absorb the loss, she said.
“Grief becomes a guide. It informs our empathy for others, our sense of permanence and meaning, of fragility,” she said. “It even informs our sense of gratitude and joy. It becomes an expansive experience, like education and travel.”
Generally, experts we spoke with think we’re all too quick to jump back into life after someone we love dies.
“We rush back to our busy lives thinking that will help us ‘get back to normal,’” Kaluzny said. “Grief doesn’t work like that. Grief doesn’t care about a big meeting or a deadline. We need time to heal.”
Time off work would also help, but, of course, not everyone has the luxury of paid time off. As much as possible, it’s important to try to find some way to pause and absorb what just happened, Kaluzny said.
“We must make room for that space. You cannot ‘get over’ possibly a lifetime of love in a few days,” she said. “Grief deserves its time.”
For Kaluzny, mourning those she’s lost and keeping their memory alive is an ongoing project. She and her husband lost a daughter in infancy, and it’s been incredibly important to keep their daughter’s spirit close and interwoven into many aspects of the family’s life.
“I ask her to protect her siblings. I talk about her. I want to hear other people say her name and not be afraid to upset me. Her name was Sage,” she said. “It may sound simple but reminding mourners that they carry their loved one’s spirit everywhere they go often opens up all kinds of healthy avenues to maintain their connection.”
Sometimes in grieving, the rabbi said we need permission to do things we aren’t used to doing: Maybe we write a letter to the person who’s gone, to capture sentiment that needs to be expressed, not bottled. We need space for the deceased in the lives of the living. We continue telling stories so younger generations know older ones as vividly as possible.
“Memory, ironically, is a living thing when you use it to keep someone close,” Kaluzny said. “It’s almost like they are holding your hand and helping you along.”
Like Kaluzny, Allen Klein, author of “Embracing Life After Loss: A Gentle Guide for Growing Through Grief,” prefers to keep those who’ve died as much in the present as possible.
“There is a Jewish saying which tells us that when we die, we die three times. First, when our brain ceases to function. Second, when our heart stops beating. Third, when our name is no longer spoken in the world,” he said.
“I think a much healthier concept for dealing with mourning is to keep the deceased alive by not forgetting them and speak of them often,” he said.
If closure isn’t the end goal of grieving, what is?
There’s a word for what Kaluzny and Klein are describing: We need “integration” after a big loss.
“Obviously there is no getting over loss. It becomes a part of you. It’s a scar that is part of your story,” Crowe said. “So the goal should be how to integrate grief in our lives so that we are more empathetic, complex and even joyful people.”
When we asked Bridget Sumser, a counselor at Mettle Health, if there was an alternative goal to the grieving process, she suggested that even the framing of the question is a bit too prescriptive, as if grief were a process to muddle through and exit as soon as humanly possible.
“The reality is, even if we did nothing consciously to process it, we’re still doing it because we’re adapting and adjusting every day to our life without that person,” she said.
The “goal,” if you’re set on having one, should just be to maintain normalcy for yourself and your family, Sumser said.
“The goal could be to take care of your physical body, the goal could be figuring out how to integrate the person’s legacy into how you live your life, the goal could be building your comfort talking about the person who died with others,” she explained.
Ladybird Morgan, another counselor at Mettle Health, agreed; ultimately, we don’t need to get over anything in order to continue moving forward in our lives.
“I actually feel it is the opposite,” she said. “The more reverence we hold for what and who has been, the more we can honor the present moment and enter into the next with curiosity and gratitude.”
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