Journaling Grief

With cremation services in Sun City, AZ is included access to grief resources and grief support. The grieving process is a long journey that never ends, but changes with time. There is no time limit on the grieving process and there are no two people who go through the grieving process exactly the same way.

Grief is a mixture of thoughts, feelings, guilt, and regrets. One of the first things that happens in the grieving process is a review of the whole relationship with the loved one who has died. It tends to be a review that ends up in a lot of self-critiquing about things that should have been done or said, could have been done or said, or would have been better done or said.

It’s important, though, to remember that the self-critique is about a past that can’t be changed. Grief journals help a grieving person make peace with this fact.

As the grieving person writes about the would haves, should haves, and could haves, the rational mind is always there saying, “You can’t go back and change it now. All you can do is go forward from today on.”

However, as a grieving person looks at all that they wished they had said or done differently in print, they may not be aware of it, but they are mentally committed to doing things differently in their relationships in the future.

Seeing everything written down helps to clear the mind out and helps to make sense of the feelings that often present in grief: sadness, sorrow, anger, resentment, and relief. These emotions don’t coexist very well together because they are sometimes opposing each other.

For example, if a deceased loved one had a long, terminal illness, there can often be a sense of profound sorrow at the loss and also a sense of profound relief, not just because the loved one isn’t suffering anymore, but because the family member no longer is bearing the burden of the responsibility for caring for them (and this can be a heavy burden sometimes). People may feel guilty for feeling relieved of the burden because it feels selfish and it feels like they really love the person they were caring for.

A grief journal can be very helpful in sorting through these feelings and understanding that each of them has their place and they can coexist without hypocrisy and their existence is not an indictment against the person who has them.

The author Joan Didion kept a grief journal after the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in 2003. Dunne suffered a sudden major heart attack at their home in December and could not be revived. Didion went into shock and then into intense grieving for a spouse, a partner, and a friend that she’d been married to for almost 40 years.

The Year of Magical Thinking was written in large part from the grief journal that Didion kept after Dunne’s death. Didion is an excellent essayist, so it’s not surprising that the prose in this book is superb. But what is even more excellent is her description of her grieving process and how it progressed through that next year. It was a grief journal that was therapeutic.

For more information on the cremation services provided in Sun City, AZ, our compassionate and experienced team at Simply Cremation & Funeral Arrangements is here to help. You can come to our funeral home at 16952 W. Bell Rd., #303, Surprise, AZ, 85374, or you can contact us today at (623) 975-9393.