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Thank you for your support. In case it is helpful to anyone, I am sharing the 10 practices that helped me through grief.
The 10 Healing Practices That Guided Me Through Grief
Grief is an overwhelming and intensely personal experience. Everyone grieves differently. There’s no "right" way to grieve and no timeline for working through one’s feelings. These are some of the guiding principles that have helped me process loss and grief. I hope they help you.
1. Seek help.
Ask for help and grief support from your healthcare provider, a grief therapist, family, friends, or a social media grief group. Find the people that sit with you, hold your hand, say nothing, and absorb your pain for a short time. Open your heart to them. I have benefited from all of these resources.
2. Forgive everyone including yourself.
Be generous with your forgiveness. In trying to console you, people may say things that worsen your pain. Forgive them, as they are not walking in your shoes. Most importantly, forgive yourself. You can’t change what happened, and you are not responsible, regardless of what you might think. You must forgive yourself to go on living. When in doubt, show yourself and others mercy.
3. Find others who understand your pain.
Grief is an isolating experience. The more one isolates and feels alone, the greater the pain. Resist the temptation to isolate yourself. Find someone who has experienced a similar loss. You are not alone.
4. Allow yourself to feel.
Grief comes with mixed emotions—sadness, anger, guilt, relief, or confusion. Many people grieving will feel all these emotions, and not necessarily in an order that makes sense. Allow yourself to experience the feelings you are having without self-judgment.
5. Honor your love.
I think grief becomes worse when one’s love has no place to go. Your love has not disappeared because the person's physical presence is gone. Hold space for the love that you felt and will continue to feel. Find a space and a place to channel this love so that it has someplace to go. Lighting a candle or planting a tree to honor your love may be helpful.
6. Be grateful.
Practice gratitude as often as you can. Be grateful for the life of the person you have lost, your own life, and the world around you. Life has no guarantees, and we are fortunate in many ways. Sometimes when I am having a quiet moment for deep breathing or meditation, I remind myself of everything that I am grateful for.
7. Be patient with yourself and give it time.
Healing doesn’t happen overnight. Grief is not something that you can force yourself to recover from. My grief therapist once told me, “When you are in the middle of hell, the only way out is to go through it.” There is no timeline for ‘recovering’ from grief. Be patient, kind, and gentle with yourself to help you process the loss.
8. Grief is not a linear process.
When I first began grieving, I remembered the five stages of grief that were described by Elisabeth Kübler-Ross many years ago: denial, anger, grief, bargaining, and acceptance. Each of these stages was meant to represent a different coping mechanism by people with a terminal diagnosis. This model wasn’t intended to describe the spectrum of grief that someone can experience. The emotions may come out of order, and some people may not have some of these emotions at all. What I think is true for most people is that the path of grief is not straight. Sometimes it might feel like one is taking a few steps forward, only to find that one is back at the starting point. Allow yourself to ride these emotional waves without judgment. There is no one way that you are “supposed to feel.”
9. Life can grow around your grief.
Lois Tonkin described this idea in 1996, which proposes that one’s grief doesn’t necessarily change in ‘size’ over time – but one’s life slowly expands around the loss. Grief is always there, as painful as ever, but there is more life around the grief. I like this way of thinking because it lets one see that the grief doesn’t need to go away for the future to feel brighter.
10. Take action meaningful for your loss.
Taking action has been incredibly helpful for me. As I started to recover from grief, I realized that taking a positive action that felt meaningful and healing to help others would also help me. Is there an organization linked to your loss where you might volunteer? What can you do that might prevent others from feeling the pain of your loss? Our actions honor our loved ones who are with us in the present and the past.
Many new readers have recently joined the “After He Said Cancer” Community, where we walk together through the emotional rollercoaster of cancer, grief, and caregiving. The lessons others have taught me in this space are incredibly valuable for surviving this stage of life and essential for my growth as a human being. Today, I will share some of those lessons below.
For a deeper dive, my paid subscribers will start receiving 1-2 private posts each month filled with personal reflections and deeper lessons.
If you have not joined the “After He Said Cancer” chat, I encourage you to do so. I want to create a community for those on a grief, cancer, or caregiving journey. Paid subscribers can initiate a thread with a question, which I will respond to with my knowledge as a physician, a caregiver, and a partner in the cancer journey.
For those who want to go even further, the "Supporters' Circle" provides priority access to be interviewed on my podcast, where we’ll meet to share your story. I have had an overwhelming response from readers who want to share their cancer, caregiving, and/or grief stories on the podcast. I learn so much from people who have been generous in telling me about their pain and what keeps them going. Although our stories may differ, there are also universal aspects where we can connect deeply.
Hi Katherine - lovely to meet you here on Substack. I've only been on since mid-January but have been enjoying the platform immensely, especially the opportunity to meet others with similar likes, loves, worries, sorrows and joys. I was diagnosed with inoperable Stage III Ovarian Cancer in March of 2024 and I am still processing the shock, sadness, anger, and fear that goes along with it. I hope you will consider coming over to Subscribe to my Stack, The Wistful Neo-Druid. I am finding it very therapeutic to write about cancer, although I am trying very hard not to make it the focus of my writing..... I'm sorry you & your husband had to go through all this - I lost my sister to breast cancer in 1991 (detailed in my 3 Part Mini-Memoir, The 2nd Daughter..... working on the last Chapter now ;) Nice to meet you.