Saying goodbye to a year of grief and loss: a guide for reflecting
As you reflect on your grief journey in 2020, what wisdom and insight do you wish to carry forward?
You made it. In a year where you likely doubted you would. A year with no road maps, no tried and true, no guarantees to steer you through the chaos, the grief, the division, the unrest, the isolation, everything that came to upend the life you knew and the way you knew how to do it — you made it. Through the hard days and long nights. The fires and storms and sudden quakes that forever changed your world. You endured, with support and coping tools and rituals that looked very different, sometimes reimagined, sometimes released to be whatever they would be. You learned to lean on love in new ways, to let it nourish you in spaces that may have once felt cold, alienating. You showed up, even when that meant barely looking up from the bed where you lay, lost to impossible sorrow.
You may be reading this thinking none of it is true. The storm is raging. The nights are an endless emptiness. Your world is still in tatters. No one is bolster, nothing is sustenance or substitute enough. For these last few weeks of 2020 may have been your most painful and harrowing yet.
And still…you are here. Here on the cusp of another year. Here in the center of your own life. Walking your own grief journey.
I do not make resolutions, haven’t for years. Yet I believe in looking back, if only to look forward, to see what we wish to carry into the new year, what we’re consciously choosing to leave behind. To acknowledge and honor who we are because of all we’ve lived.
One of my New Year’s practices has been choosing a word for the coming year — as an anchor of a promise to myself, as a companion, a mantra, something to grow with, or an arrow bearing that word’s energy into the months ahead.
If you were to choose a word to companion your grief journey, what would it be? What might you need more of in the year to come? What is your healing asking of you? What do you want from your healing? How do you wish to hold your losses and still allow space for joy, beauty, hope, connection?
Given how complex, layered and ever-shifting grief is, it may seem daunting and perhaps infeasible, ludicrous even, to land on one word. And that’s OK. Maybe a phrase finds you. Maybe it’s an affirmation. Or a quote from a poem, passage or something else you’ve read that you choose to walk alongside of in the next 12 months.
Maybe it’s enough to simply reflect, to sit with the year that’s been and yield to the one to come.
However you choose to let go of 2020, here are some questions for further reflection.
What have you learned from grief?
What have you learned about your own resilience? About compassion? Forgiveness? Courage? Faith? Love?
What, if anything, have you been gifted from your grief journey?
What do you trust or believe in that you didn’t before? Or what do you now have a greater trust and belief in?
How have you made time to nourish and attend your sorrow? What practices can you deepen or create anew in 2021 to care for your grief?
What or who has not served you on your journey that you wish to develop a different relationship with or leave behind?
Where did you experience grace while grieving your losses?
Who are the grace-makers in your life, (strangers and/or loved ones who’ve shown up for you)? What have they taught or reminded you?
How has your grief journey changed you? And what do you know to be true and unchangeable about yourself?
How do you plan to honor your departed loved one(s) in the year ahead? What is their legacy to you, to their family, their community? Is that a legacy you wish to carry forward in some way?
Wherever you find yourself on this New Year’s Eve, I’m wishing you gentleness for all that aches, fortitude to take the small, next step, spaciousness to honor your journey your way and healing love to tend your heart.