Nancy: Losing a loved one feels like losing an arm
or like losing a part of yourself.
It's a traumatic experience.
David: Thankfully, in the days following your loss,
you're surrounded by friends and family to help you,
and during that time,
you're often feeling numb and disconnected.
It's as if God has designed our bodies to limit the amount
of pain we can tolerate at one time.
Nancy: But soon after the funeral, your family
and friends pack up and go home.
And you're left, figuratively speaking, without an arm,
trying to figure out how to function without a crucial piece
of your life, a crucial person in your life.
And that's why we're here in a physical therapist's office.
After the initial trauma of losing an arm is over,
a person no longer needs
to be constantly supervised by a doctor.
However, he or she still needs help adjusting to life
without a limb. Even the simplest things, like driving
or getting milk out of the refrigerator become much more
challenging when you only have one arm.
Nancy: And in a similar way,
things have gotten a lot more challenging for you.
Going to bed alone or not having a child to wake you
up each morning takes some getting used to,
and there are many other emotional, spiritual,
and physical challenges that death brings into our lives.
So you need some help learning how to live
without your loved one.
Your GriefShare group is a place
where you can find the help you need
to make the needed adjustments to your life.
So, today, were going to present some
of the most common challenges you'll face
after the death of a loved one.
We'll explain how you can apply the concepts you learn here
in GriefShare to help you deal with some of those challenges.
Some of the things you'll learn can be used right away;
others will be helpful down the road.
Hopefully, as you become familiar
with these common challenges,
you'll stop thinking you're grieving abnormally,
you'll be more comfortable seeking help,
and you'll be more patient with yourself as you heal
from the pain of your loved one's death.
Welcome to GriefShare.
[Music]
Since your loss, you may not enjoy life anymore.
This is another common reaction to the death of a loved one.
Bernard: I lost interest in doing things.
I was just going through the motions of
living from day-to-day, but I couldn't focus
and I was constantly distracted.
The typical things that I enjoyed doing,
like going to movies or watching videos at home,
I had no real interest in doing any of those things.
I think when my father died, I would have periods
of just really tired and be exhausted.
I stopped talking to people, kind of shut down,
wouldn't return phone calls, you know, hobbies I had, you know,
exercise I used to do, I just kind of stayed in the house.
I remember everything
feeling like it was going in slow motion.
My son and I, we'd go to play dates with other moms
with young children, and it's a very happy environment,
young children playing and I can just remember just looking
and being like, and thinking to myself,
why am I here doing this?
When I used to go to the clubs and party and everything,
I like, well I liked to dance anyway,
that's the main reason I go, now,
it's not fun for me anymore.
Like, I'm there physically, but I'm not there.
I just don't feel like doing anything.
Some of my habits have changed as far as me getting up,
getting a shower every day.
It's not really that important if I'm not going anywhere.
It was probably the first 3, 4 months, there was no hope.
I couldn't sleep.
I had to be told to eat stuff.
I had like, I was going on autopilot.
And then I think the thing that really drove the point home
for me was that I typically read about 3 newspapers a day,
and I was noticing that the newspapers were starting
to stack up, and some were in the plastic bags unopened,
and I knew then that I needed to get someone
to help me fix Bernard.
There's a cartoon that I like of a grieving person laying
in bed that's reading the book, “How To Get Up and Get Dressed,"
because that's often how grieving people feel,
like I just don't have the energy,
even though a person does nothing physically,
a lot of times people think, I don't know why I'm so tired,
so exhausted, but grieving, partly because part
of it is an emotional experience is just so wearing, so fatiguing
for people, that it feels like I've done a day's work
and all I've tried to do is cope with the fact
that my loved one died.
It's easy to understand why you don't feel
like doing much now that your loved one is gone.
Over the next few weeks, well introduce you
to others who've reinvested in life,
and show you how they did it.
We' ll also explain the emotional, physical, spiritual,
and relational consequences of getting stuck in your grief.
And finally, we' ll show you how faith in Christ and your desire
to honor the person who died,
provide powerful motivation to move forward.
But some of you can't wait
until you feel better to be productive.
You have a job or other responsibilities
that you can't ignore, here's some advice on how
to get things done at work while you're dealing with grief.
Beth: When I came back to work, which was just about 10 days
after I, after she passed away, I was on a church staff,
and the ministers that I worked alongside of, just said,
“Oh Beth, we're just so thrilled you're back, that we've got,
we've got to do this, we've got to do that,
we've got to plan this conference,
we need you to take this over." Dada, dada, da.
And I wanted to say, “My mother just died."
I really respect people who are grieving
and must go into the workplace.
It is hard to focus.
It is hard to do, in the first weeks,
it's hard to do anything, but breathe.
When you have to go back to work, if it's all possible,
decrease whatever responsibilities you can,
and if not, recognize that even in the initial days
after the loved one's death,
you were still setting aside your grief
to accomplish various tasks,
because there are certain things that you have to do.
You have to plan a funeral, you have to write an obituary,
you still have to function.
That's the mindset, really, on a practical level that you have
to take with you when you go back to work.
If people find that they have to work, which is very common
in today's world, then I would say,
don't let people rush you through your grief.
Be prepared for the workforce that you work
with to not always understand or want to talk about it.
But for people that are having, struggling to focus,
when on the job, I just have a couple of suggestions,
in the morning, take a few minutes, a couple of minutes
and just acknowledge I'm grieving, and I'm going
to come back home tonight and spend an hour with that grief.
But right now, I'm just going to shut that door and I'm going
to go to work and function as well as I can.
And don't expect to function as well as you used to.
But do your best.
And then come home and give yourself some grief time,
deliberately look at photos, or listen to music,
or deliberately have some grief time.
And by managing your grief,
I think you'll be able to manage focusing at work.
After someone loses an arm or a leg in an accident,
he fears the uncertainty of the future and what life will be
like without his limb.
He wonders, “Will I reinjure myself?"
“Will I be able to do the things I used to do?"
Or, I'm scared to feel the pain of rehab.
In a similar way, doing life
without your loved one is a scary prospect.
Anne: John died of pneumonia,
and a couple of months after he died, we had his kids come and stay with us,
my nephew, whose named after John, John the third, was coughing
and really wasn't feeling well, so I took him to the doctor,
and the doctor examined him and said, well, you know,
I think John's got a case of walking pneumonia.
And just those John and pneumonia, thought, "Oh my gosh, Lord,
are we going there again?"
Did I have enough money?
Did I enough time?
How was I going to make all this work?
Emotionally, I felt like I had just shut myself off
to a lot of people.
Because I just didn't want to, like I said,
feel that pain again, if something would happen
to somebody that close.
Weeks before Jeff died, I, I felt extremely thankful
for our relationship, and I voiced that to God,
just, “Thank you so much for giving me a loving husband
and this relationship.
I couldn't ask for more."
And then he was taken away from me.
And it, I was kind of scared to be thankful for anything.
So I kind of went through this time of I don't want
to thank God for things, because He's just going
to take it away from me.
When we walk through a death that is unexpected,
we begin to think everything in my life
that I thought was stable and secure, is not,
in fact, stable and secure.
And then we worry.
Of course we do.
As you can see, people commonly deal with all sorts
of fears after the death of a loved one.
To overcome them, you'll need effective strategies
and an understanding of how God promises to help you.
In upcoming sessions, we' ll give you specific steps for coping
with the fear of entering a room that reminds you
of your loved one, or cleaning out your loved one's belongings,
and we' ll even show you how to handle the fear
of facing your emotions.
Along the way, we'll also share helpful truths and stories
that remind you of God's promises.
Nancy: For most people who have suffered a serious injury,
the rehab and other work needed
to resume a functional life seems overwhelming at times,
and in the same way, you can feel overloaded by the emotions
and the changes that come after the death of a loved one.
You may inherit new responsibilities
in the absence of that person.
Those tasks, coupled with raging emotions,
make life seem unmanageable.
[ Music]
Karen: I wasn't sleeping so I was fatigued.
It was difficult to get up in the morning, get everybody
out of the house, get myself out of the house, and then make it
through the day, I was teaching kindergarten, that was kind
of draining in and of itself.
And then to come home, I had kept my kids in sports
and scouts so that they would have those male influences,
and I wanted to keep that going.
So just continuing to do the things
that I felt were important for myself and my family,
became more and more difficult.
I had gotten pregnant with my son and everything,
and dealing with being pregnant and losing my mother,
and now I'm trying to cope with, you know, grieving and stuff,
it wasn't, I couldn't, I couldn't like, I didn't want
to deal with life, so all I just did was just sleep.
I realized that I just didn't really have a handle on things.
It's painful learning the new things about how to live alone.
Well since Jeanne died, I've had trouble remembering things,
and I begin to realize that she was a large part of my memory,
reminding me of things, but since then, my daughters have tried
to help me remind things and they've helped me set
up reminders on my cell phone so I can remember to do things.
In our last session, we learned that instead of focusing
on everything that needs to be done,
sometimes all you can do is concentrate on the next thing.
When you're grieving you'll need to ask others for help,
and you'll need their encouragement.
If you're not sure how to ask for this kind of help,
or if you're uncomfortable doing so, we'll show you how
in upcoming GriefShare sessions.
In the meantime, we can point you to some immediate help
in your GriefShare workbook.
Look for the section called, How to Write a Grief Letter.
It explains polite ways to ask for help from others.
[ Music]
I was doing some gardening, and just out of the corner
of my eye, I saw this couple walking down the street,
and it just, it just killed me.
Joanne, why was that so hard for you to see?
I think because I'll never get to walk down the street
with my husband again.
Beth: Marshall's hospital bed was in the living room,
so he could see the birds and see people when they came
in and, you know, he died in that bed.
And, it was difficult coming back
in the door and not seeing him.
It was very hard to just be in the house,
knowing that shes not sitting there.
I'm not having to give her her medicine.
Even though I knew Rick was dying for 18 years,
that after his funeral, the first night I crawled
into bed alone, I felt devastated.
And getting into bed at night, that is the biggest, loneliest bed,
and I, so far, have not been able
to pull the covers down on that side.
I would call my brother-in-law's cell phone
because her voice was on the answering machine message,
and I would listen to it
when I knew he wouldn't answer the phone.
We would never again have her open up the
refrigerator and yell, we don't have anything to eat here.
And when I heard her humming, I knew she was happy.
And the fun thing to me was to try to figure
out what she's humming, and about 90 percent
of the time I couldn't.
I miss that.
It's a very quiet house now.
There is no, no humming and she's not there.
My dad loved a song called Do Wah Diddy,
Diddy Dum Diddy Do [laughing], and when I hear that song
it reminds me of my dad snapping his fingers,
singing the song, shuffling his feet.
My father had great conversations with me from,
as a young child, about, well, what was going on in the world.
We would talk about it, what do you think about it?
And so, I think 9/11 happened, when that happened,
he had died that year before, and I remember thinking,
I wonder what Dad would of, would of thought of all this.
He was a creature of habit.
The coffee had to be in a certain spot on the shelf,
because he made coffee every morning.
His saucer and his cup had to be in a certain place.
So, sometimes when those times happened, like,
like if I open the cabinet and someone has moved the coffee,
the first thing I'm thinking is, Daddy won't see the coffee,
so I, I remember, I would kind of like move the coffee over,
knowing that he's not going to come to get the coffee,
but the coffee, I wanted the coffee can to be
where he would know to get it.
And once in a while, I wish, I wish I could find a, like a,
a disc or a roll of film that's got some new pictures of her,
because I've seen all the old pictures and,
I just want a new look at Melissa, even if she's still 17,
it just would be so refreshing to, to have a new look.
Everybody else gets that with their kids.
They get to see them grow up and change and, and, it's a loss to,
to know that your daughter will always remain 17 in your eyes.
Still to this day, you know, I have say, things, good things
and bad things that may come up in my life, and I want to pick
up the phone and call her and share it with her,
and she's just not there to tell.
She won't be here to, to do as she planned
to do, to take care of me.
And so that, that's the most difficult part.
The intimate part of life that a couple shares,
there's no substitute for that, anywhere,
and that's going to be, physical intimacy,
it's going to be humor, private jokes.
You know, when you love somebody like I loved her,
when they die, it's really hard.
I'm so happy for my mother, because she is well,
shes healed, she is happy beholding you,
she's with our former family members, but Lord,
she was my best friend outside of Rick and, and it hurts
to the core to be without her.
She was a gourmet cook,
and every day was a new gourmet meal that she was fixing.
And so I miss that, the smell of that cooking
and the food there in my home, our home.
You don't want to give up the memories
of how good it felt to hold her hand.
You don't want to give up the memories of how,
how nice it was just sitting in the chair,
watching TV, not talking.
Or watching her read her Bible on the porch.
Or see that smile on her face
when the grandkids would come in.
Larry: The regret or unfinished was not recognizing
just how much she was of a helping person.
I would just move on and, and not realizing, just how caring
and how loving she was for our family.
I just wished I had recognized how supportive
and caring and loving she was.
It happened so fast that I didn't really have time to talk
to her and tell her that she was very sick
and they said that she might die.
I didn't have time to explain that to her, and tell her,
you know, goodbye, in case she didn't make it, and tell her
that I loved her, it just happened really, really fast.
[ Music]
I know that she knew that I loved her, just as though I know
that she loved me, deeply.
We expressed it differently,
and just like any sibling relationship, there are highs
and there are lows and there are challenges
when you grow up with somebody.
Female Narrator: Heather's sister, Rebecca, died from cancer at a young age.
Heather wishes she had a better relationship with her.
Heather: I just wish that I could go back
and express myself differently, redo situations,
so that we could have a different relationship
when she was alive.
Female Narrator: Heather's regret made it difficult for her
to heal from her grief.
Heather: I spent a lot of time regretting some
of the choices I made growing up with my sister, and I,
I wanted to relive some of the moments, and I, getting stuck
on that didn't help my grief process.
It made it so, so much worse,
because you can't live in the past.
I mean, I can't go back
and change how I treated her as a teenager.
So, it, it hung me up.
Female Narrator: Perhaps you regret having an argument
with your loved one prior to his death,
you wished that you'd provided better quality medical care
for him, or you wish you'd taken the time to say, I love you,
one more time before he died.
Regardless of the source of your regrets,
don't beat yourself up over them.
The Bible indicates that those who die want the best
for the living, and that they don't harbor bitterness
or anger toward you.
Regret is a common and painful grief experience.
In a future session, we'll give you more information on how
to move past those thoughts and feelings.
So far in this session, we've compared the emotional
and spiritual pain of grief to what it feels
like to lose an arm or recover from some other serious injury.
And the reality is, the loss
of someone we love does impact us physically, as well.
Brad: Grief is something that wears on us, not just emotionally,
but mentally and physically.
Some people have difficulty going
to sleep, maintaining sleep.
My stomach would hurt.
I had nausea.
I would get headaches.
My chest hurt.
It feels like you're going, you're not going
to survive it yourself.
You just, you just feel sick.
Since grief affects your body, healing involves more
than simply waiting to feel better.
When a person loses a loved one,
that's a very stressful moment in a person's life.
And research shows that when a person is
under prolonged distress, ongoing stress, that's going
to be detrimental to the emotional health
and also physical health.
So a person who is grieving will need
to take a multidimensional approach to take care of,
of himself or herself.
Because we talked about how grief affects the person
as a whole, the whole person.
As a whole, the whole person.
So the care, or self-care, needs to be holistic.
I think it's very important that grieving people, perhaps,
think about this acronym, DEER.
To drink, meaning hydrate themselves adequately.
To eat regular meals and balanced ones,
even if they don't feel like cooking
to exercise on a regular basis.
Dr. Moitinho: And when I say exercise, doesn't mean joining a gym
and working out, but going for walks, because it,
it's important to get the body in motion.
I try to walk a mile or two a day,
I take my little dog Iggy, for a walk.
I, I'm not doing as well as I should.
I was lifting weights for a while and I need to get back
to it, and, but anyway, I am consistent in walking, and,
and I do believe that it helps.
Just start with some small steps and build up.
But just get yourself outside if its nice weather and walk
down the walkway a little bit, and to get adequate rest.
Down the walkway a little bit, and to get adequate rest.
Grieving is a very intensely fatiguing process.
And I know sometimes a person will say, I can't sleep,
but even so, the person needs to lie down and rest.
Hello, yes, I'd like to make an appointment with Dr. Sykes please.
Nancy: In addition to taking care of yourself, it's important
that you see a doctor after the death
of a loved one, and here's why.
Many times, especially with an anticipated death,
the caregiver, often the spouse and family members are
so surrounding the person dying
that they aren't really paying any attention
to how they're feeling or what their health is like,
and so I would say that's one of the first things
that a widowed person needs to do after the death of a spouse,
is to go and get a good physical.
And I did that, and, because I'd had some dramatic weight
loss and that's not unusual either,
either dramatic weight loss or gain or whatever's not unusual.
And, you know, so he did a general test
and there was nothing particular, but, you know,
my stress level was pretty high
and he just made some suggestions
and he also told me I could keep drinking my coffee,
which I felt guilty about,
and so he relieved some guilt, and that was good.
And so he relieved some guilt, and that was good.
So things like that, you need to try to do as soon as you can.
Five years, I've been dealing with the, the death,
leading up to the death.
So, it took a toll on me, physically.
So after my husband died, I went to the doctor, I was diagnosed
with high blood pressure,
never had blood pressure problems in my life.
I had high cholesterol.
I had glaucoma.
I had every ache that you can think of, my shoulders hurt,
my knees hurt, everything hurt.
The biggest thing was I had a rapid weight gain after that.
So I was ballooning, just getting bigger and bigger
and bigger, eating the wrong foods,
because I didn't want to take time to cook.
I didn't want to take time to eat alone, when I did eat,
I had fast foods a lot, so all these health issues surfaced.
Scientific studies show that people
who are physically injured will heal more quickly
when they believe they can handle the rigors of rehab,
and believe they can get better.
In a similar way, your beliefs
about God affect your recovery from grief.
Trouble is, when you're grieving
God sometimes feels distant.
If that's how you feel right now, you're not alone.
Marne: At first, I couldn't pray at all.
I just felt like the only,
only prayer that I could utter was, "Oh God."
Early on, I remember just sitting
and trying to read my Bible.
But there was this kind of white noise in the background.
I would read and nothing was sinking in.
I wasn't even really comprehending the passages
that I was looking at, and it was that way for months.
At the beginning, I didn't want to pray.
I didn't want anything to do with, I, I didn't want anything
to do with God, but I wanted the answers.
I wanted the answers to why.
I just couldn't understand how God could take our child,
I felt like we served Him, our whole lives were,
our whole lives revolved in Christian work,
and I just felt mistakenly that nothing would ever happen
to our family like that.
I'm thinking, well, God, something must be wrong.
I know what your word says, and I know you said you're going
to take care of all our needs.
You're going to be our provider, but I don't feel it.
You forget all the promises God's made, and,
and you know all of them, but then you just, I don't know,
it's, it's the thing about losing somebody.
I think you forget all that stuff.
And I've seen people in the church who's gone through death
and loss, and I've seen them, but they seem to be okay.
So I'm thinking, okay, well maybe somethings wrong with me.
[ Music]
Feeling that God has abandoned you is a very painful place to be.
Ironically, sometimes our beliefs about God cause us
to believe He's ignoring us.
For many people, there is a belief about God
and what it means to be a Christian
that makes their experience of grief more difficult.
And that would be the belief that if I follow God,
if I'm faithful, then He will protect me from all suffering.
Dr. Crabb: That if we're really deeply spiritual about it,
if we're really Christian people, then trusting Him
and believing in Him and knowing He loves us,
that we're just not going to hurt.
And if we think that way, then there's really one
of two problems that we fall into.
Either we begin to think that we failed.
“I didn't do something right, my faith wasn't strong enough,
and God removed his protection, because I did something wrong,"
or we begin to think, God reneged.
God is not trustworthy.
God did not come through on what he said he would do.
And so I think it's very important for us
to have a clear picture of what it means
to be a Christian who will suffer.
As David and I dealt with the deaths of our two children,
our faith in Christ helped us,
but not in the ways we initially expected.
At first, we thought our faith would insulate us from the pain.
But instead, we learned that our faith
in Christ sustained us in the midst of it.
It's a myth, first to say,
that faith simply is, is happiness.
Faith is somehow a lighthearted confidence in God.
Faith, true faith, is expressed in the shadows, in this valley
of the shadow of death, when,
when we can't see our God clearly, and we say, Lord,
I trust you, but help me to trust you,
because the loss still feels like it's going to overwhelm me.
And you've got to tell yourself, although I feel alone,
although there are people who say they love me,
who haven't shown up for me in this moment,
although I don't feel God's presence, he is with me.
Let me give you an example.
If I'm in my basement, on a bright sunny day, and the shades
in the basement are, are pulled,
and so it's pitch dark down there.
The sun hasn't ceased to shine at all.
There is something at that moment
that is clouded my ability to see the sun,
that's what grief does.
Grief blocks my ability to see God.
But I shouldn't conclude that means that He's absent.
And so, as I'm going through the grief, I've got to be talking
to myself, and say, God's with you.
You don't feel Him, you didn't feel Him today,
but it's because the emotions of grief are so powerful
that they tend to obstruct my sense of God's presence.
Over the next few weeks, we' ll help you see what it means
to trust God as you grieve,
because unless you find your hope in Him, you have no chance
of fully recovering from your grief.
David: Your GriefShare workbook will show you more
about how God wants to help you as you're grieving.
So, as you have the strength,
take time to complete the daily exercises.
Nancy: I'll go so far as to say
that whether you think you have the strength or not,
it's vital that you make time to seek after God each day.
And your workbook is a great structured way to do that.
It's okay to start slowly, perhaps just
by reading one exercise and working your way up to reading
and prayer, but it is crucial for you
to seek God's help in healing.
So try to spend some time using your workbook this week.
Male Narrator: In this week's From Mourning
to Joy exercises, you'll meet Mike.
Discover why he felt like his brain stopped working
as he grieved his wife's death,
and find out how he kept his emotions
from taking control of his life.
In the next session of GriefShare, you'll learn
about challenges and temptations others have encountered
on the journey of grief,
and you'll discover how they dealt with them.
H. Norman: I remember the first time that I received something
in the mail that said, H. Norman Wright,
widower, I sort of bristled.
Everyone wondered, when David was killed,
is Cindy going to go back to drugs?
Somebody looked at me one day,
well why can't you just get over it?
And then one night, I made a phone call to some dealers.
It takes time to recover from the death of a loved one,
and we hope that after this session you better understand why.
We also hope you apply some of the ideas we've shared today,
like DEER, how to be productive while you're grieving,
and doing your workbook exercises.
Even though it will be hard,
you'll ultimately be glad you put forth the effort.
If you're finding GriefShare helpful,
and we hope that you are, why not invite someone you know
to come to the next session with you?
You may know a friend, family member, neighbor,
or co-worker who'd benefit by being a part of this group.
Let them know they're welcome here.
Thanks for joining us.
We' ll see you next time.