Take Heart

Four Lessons About Grief

• Amy J Brown, Carrie Holt and Sara Clime • Season 1 • Episode 34

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As special needs moms we are familiar with grief. We have the big losses that change our lives in a moment and the little griefs we often fail to recognize.  This week, Amy shares her experience with grief and the lessons she has learned. 

April 6, 2021

Timestamps & Key Topics:

  • 0:20-    Intro
  • 1:02-    Griefs: Big & Small
  • 2:59-    Two Losses
  • 5:01-    Acknowledge It
  • 7:06-    Allow It
  • 9:35-    Pay Attention
  • 11:03-  Abide
  • 12:43-  Blessing

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0:20  Welcome to Take Heart, where our goal is to give you hope, offer insight and encouragement so you can flourish in your journey as a special needs mom. Each week Sara, Amy, and Carrie will explore a theme, share inspiring stories, practical tips, and encouragement you can use on your journey. Using our combined experience of over 30 years of parenting children with special needs, it is our prayer that you take heart and have the courage you need to embrace each day.

1:02  Welcome. I'm Amy Brown, and this month we're talking about grief. As special needs moms, we are familiar with grief. We are all living a life we did not expect and with that comes grief. We have weird ideas about grief. No one likes to talk about it. People are often uncomfortable with it. We feel like unless someone has died, we cannot label what we are feeling as grief. We compare ourselves to others and do not give ourselves permission to grieve because there's always somebody who has it worse than us. Many times we do not even recognize we are grieving. Unfortunately, I am very familiar with grief. I've suffered the grief of infertility, miscarriage. I've lost two sisters and both my parents. I have felt that weird grief that hits you when your baby grows up and leaves for college. It's like a mixture of pride, love and sadness. I've also felt the grief of having a child with reactive attachment disorder and the pain that that brings to our family. These are all big things, the life events that stop you in your tracks, like the day you got your child's diagnosis. I'm sure you remember exactly where you were when your life turned upside down. But there are often small griefs that happen daily that we fail to recognize or acknowledge in the busyness of life, little things we just gloss over: time spent with our spouse, hobbies you can no longer do now that you're caring for your child, or friendships that don't seem to fit anymore now that you're a special needs mom. 

Over the course of my life, I've dealt with my grief in different ways. I've avoided it, denied it. I've not even recognized it sometimes. I've been consumed by it. But eventually, I've learned to live with it. I want to share with you two different experiences of grief in my life and what I learned from them. 

2:59 The first is the death of my beautiful sister Julie. Julie died 15 years ago, she was 37 and she had lung cancer. I was with her the day she died. She was my best friend, a mom to two, funny and amazing. The day she died was the absolute worst day of my life. Sometimes in a grief like this, all the lights go out. When Julie died, it's like I entered into a dark cave, and I couldn't see my hand in front of my face. The pain and the darkness in that period were so pervasive, all I had the power to do is turn to God. 

The second grief is dealing with the diagnosis of reactive attachment disorder. In this situation, the changes in our lives were gradual, and I did not recognize I was grieving. I was too busy trying to solve all the problems. I was busy trying to fix everything and did not acknowledge my grief, and therefore did not deal with it. And honestly, I did not even turn to God. 

Both were situations in which I was grieving. In the first one, I was paralyzed and had to rely on God. I had no choice. In the second, I relied on myself. Both situations were hard, and I still grieve both of them to this day and every day. But here's a newsflash for you. Relying on God is a better way to go. Now let me be absolutely clear. Relying on God did not make it all go away and make it all better. But relying on God steadied me in the choppy waters of grief. Grief is hard, and it's inevitable, and I wish with all my heart you didn't have to grieve. It is a part of our lives as special needs moms, and I want to share some lessons I have learned along the way. 

5:01 The first lesson, acknowledge it. Acknowledge you are grieving and remember that death is not the only prerequisite to grief. Sometimes we do not allow ourselves to grieve because there's not been an actual death. The person you are grieving is still alive. Maybe you're grieving a situation, a loss of a friendship, a change in what your child can do, but notice how you are feeling. Notice that grief. Some of the signs of grief are not just sadness and tears. You may feel anxious or suffer insomnia. Grief can play out in our bodies and physical symptoms. You may feel chest pressure or shortness of breath, but pay attention and acknowledge it. C.S. Lewis wrote in his book A Grief Observed, and this is a book he wrote after his wife, Joy, died. “No one ever told me that grief felt so much like fear. I'm not afraid, but the sensation is like being afraid. The same fluttering in the stomach, the same restlessness, the yawning, I keep on swallowing.” So grief doesn't always look like tears. It feels like other emotions. For me, there are two ways I act that I don't always recognize is grief. The first one is over doing it getting busier and busier, spinning faster and trying to fix it all. The other which is a complete opposite is wanting to crawl in bed and pull the covers over my head. I noticed during the beginning of the pandemic that I often found myself wanting to crawl in bed and put the covers over my head. That's not normal for me, I usually don't do that. For several days in a row, I would get in bed, my body ached, and I put the covers over my head. I thought to myself, what's going on here? Why do I feel this way? Then it occurred to me, this is what you feel like when you're grieving. It is important to acknowledge your grieving and to notice and name it. One more thing to remember. Nothing is too insignificant to name. 

7:06 Lesson two: allow. Allow yourself to grieve. I'm going to tell you from experience that you cannot avoid or go around grief. Barbara Brown Taylor says in her book, Learning to Walk in the Dark, “Sadness does not sink a person; it is the energy we use to avoid it that does.” You cannot outrun grief. I've tried it, literally, like actual running. Several years ago, I had a miscarriage and the pain of that loss crushed me. Guess what I did? I started running like Forrest Gump running. I ran in the morning. I ran in the evenings when my husband got home from work. Sometimes I even ran in the afternoon. I ran literal miles and miles every day. Finally, my sweet husband said to me. He put his hands on my shoulders, looked me in the eye and said, which was painfully obvious to everyone but me, “You cannot outrun this. You have to go through it.” In her book Safe Passage, author Molly Fumia says this, “The experience of grieving cannot be ordered or categorized, hurried or controlled, pushed aside or ignored indefinitely. It is inevitable as breathing as change, as love. It may be postponed, but it will not be denied.” 

Also, there's no timeline for grief, and don't let anyone tell you there is. About six months after my sister died, a friend said to me, shouldn't you be over this by now? Okay, after feeling hurt and angry, I will admit that I wondered what's wrong with me? Why am I still grieving? Am I overreacting? I know that sounds silly. But grief has no timeline. In both situations, my sister's death and our daughter's RAD, I'm still grieving those situations every single day. It just looks different now. So don't compare your journey. Your journey is your journey. Do not numb or muzzle it. If you try to numb the hard feelings of grief, you will also numb the good feelings like joy. As a special needs mom, you may feel too overwhelmed to even give space to what you need to grieve. We're often too busy to even recognize what we need. Please allow yourself to grieve and grieve in a way that you need to. 

9:35 Lesson three: Pay attention. Pay attention to the lessons learned in grief. I don't mean you have to find meaning in the grief right away or ever. I got so tired of people saying to me, “I know why God took your sister. He needed another angel in heaven.” Do not get me started on that. The lessons learned in grief will serve you well the next time you are grieving or you're with someone who's grieving. For example, like the angel comment, people say really dumb things in the face of grief. I could do an entire episode on that. They just don't know what to say. I know now that when someone is grieving, it's not my job to find meaning, offer spiritual platitudes or solutions. The most loving thing I can do is to come alongside, listen, and say, “I am sorry.” I have learned in grief that it will not kill me. I will live to see another day, and that God is faithful. I have learned that my experience with grief will serve me well in the future and when I walk with someone else who is grieving. C.S. Lewis said, “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.” So I'm asking you to pay attention to that landscape, and let it teach you. 

11:03 Lesson four: Abide. This is the most important step and sometimes it's the hardest. Abiding means to stay fixed or settled into something. So, abide in Jesus, settle into him. That same Jesus that healed the blind, and fed the 5000, and bid the little children to come to him, that same Jesus that wept at the death of Lazarus. That same Jesus sees you. He loves you, and he is always with you whether you feel it or not. It's okay to take it to him - to take it all to him. It's okay to tell him exactly how you feel. We all know that the Bible is filled with Psalms of lament. For example Psalm 13, the first few verses say, “How long, O Lord? Will you forget me forever? How long will you hide your face for me? How long must I wrestle with my thoughts day after day and have sorrow in my heart? How long will my enemy triumph over me? (NIV) That sounds like a person who is grieving. God can handle whatever you have to say to him. He does not leave you. Look for his love and grace and the signs of life around you. Look for the hands and feet of Jesus around you, the friends that are there for you, the meals left on the doorstep, the sun on your face, and the signs of spring, the prayers whispered in the dark for you. These little sips of grace on your parched throat will give you the strength to walk this journey of grief. 

12:43 I'd like to end with a couple of verses in the Bible that are a comfort to me. They start with a lament and grief , and they end with trusting in God. The first comes from 

Habakkuk 3:17-19 (ESV): “Though the fig tree should not blossom, nor fruit be on the vines, the produce of the olives fail, and the fields yield no food, and the flock be cut off from the fold and there be no herd in the stalls, yet I will rejoice in the Lord; I will take joy in the God of my salvation. God, the Lord, is my strength; he makes my feet like the deer’s; he makes me tread on high places.” The second one is probably my favorite. Lamentations 3:19-26. “I remember my affliction and my wandering, the bitterness and gall. I remember them well and my soul is downcast within me. Yet this I call to mind and therefore I have hope. Because of the Lord's great love we are not consumed, for his compassions never fail. They are new every morning; great is your faithfulness. I say to myself, “The Lord is my portion; therefore I will wait for him.” The lord is good to those who hope in him, to the one who seeks him. It is good to wait quietly for the salvation of the Lord.” 

14:24 Thank you for joining us this week on Take Heart. I hope these words encourage you if you're in a season of grieving. I have another resource I would love to tell you about. Carrie has a free resource on our website, Eight Practices for Processing Grief. You can find it at www.carriemholt.com. We will have it in the show notes. You can follow us on Instagram or Facebook @takeheartspecialmoms. If you have any questions or comments or would like to share your story with us, follow the links in our show notes. We love hearing from our listeners Listen in next Tuesday as Carrie shares her thoughts on grief.