Grieving a loss that wasn’t…

Walking along the small beach at the nearby lake one afternoon, amongst the washed-up twigs and remnants of weekend sand castles, I spotted a tiny little footprint.  And I began to cry. Those 5 little toe markings held much more meaning for me than simply an imprint in the sand.

Until recently I wasn’t very familiar with grieving. It’s not that I never had anything to grieve over, but that grief was a feeling that hurt so much I didn’t feel safe feeling it. I didn’t know how.

Grief is typically defined as a natural response to loss. It's the emotional suffering you feel when something or someone you love is taken away.

Years of my life had been governed by eating disorders, depression, and suffocated feelings.  24 years to be exact. I was well aware of the anxiety I smothered daily, and late at night tears revealed deep pain, loneliness and an unexplainable deep sadness. But it wasn’t until well past a year into my recovery that I realized much of the sadness I felt was actually grief.  

There was “normal” grief, over relationships that had broken apart, over the loss of family members, and over the loss of my favorite cat Timaru (who I still haven’t fully let go of). But what took me a while to figure out was that I seemed to be grieving things I never had, and therefore never truly lost.

When I woke up from 24 years of a life in hiding, throughout which I had used food (or the lack of) to cope with insecurity, low self-esteem, and insecure attachments, looking around and backwards at my life in the rear view, I was made blatantly, painfully aware of the many life experiences I never had. People never talk about grief that comes from the absence of something that has never been rather than the absence of something that used to be.

Maybe you’ve labeled missed opportunities as “regrets”, but regret is a little different.  Regret implies that a choice was made or not made, and you wish you’d made a different decision. It’s a feeling we experience when we look back on something we did and realize we could have or should have handled the situation differently.  It implies ownership of the path you took at the fork in the road.  

Grieving a loss you never had to lose doesn’t have this kind of explanation behind it.  It’s a feeling of deep sorrow and, in some ways, one of helplessness over something absent in the past- missed opportunities over which you had no say or control because you didn’t know at the time you were missing out.  Think of it as a delayed feeling of being left behind, left out, or forgotten about.  

Perhaps what stings most about this type of grief is that, even if you weren’t aware of it at the time, or incapable of doing differently, the path you took in life did cause the losses and missed opportunities.  So there is a sort of ownership over the outcome, but one that doesn’t quite make sense.  Things that happened to deprive you were certainly no fault of anyone else’s, but nor were they a fault of your own.  We like to find reasons behind pain- it helps us process what has happened and move forward.  So when we don’t have concrete answers, and only gaps in time during which it seems life’s blessings we’re withheld, it can be difficult to let go of the past with peace.  

The wisdom of scripture can help us remove guilt from our shoulders, by reminding us that the direction of our lives if governed by He who is so much greater than we are and cares for us immeasurably more than we can imagine. 

“And if God cares so wonderfully for flowers that are here today and thrown into the fire tomorrow, he will certainly care for you.“ Luke 12:28

And know that, no matter how badly you believe you have screwed up, God’s ability to get you to where He needs for you to go is FAR greater than your ability to mess up His plans and get permanently lost!

“For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.” Jeremiah 29:11

Together, these verses can serve as a haven for your soul as you work through the grieving process and let go to move freely into the better times to come.

 In 1969, Elisabeth Kubler Ross came up with the concept of the cycle of grief in her classic book, “On Death and Dying”, which outlines five stages a person goes through when they suffer loss: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and finally, acceptance.  Self-grieving is an act of compassion and care for the parts of you that are hurting deeply.  Going through the entire grief cycle is paramount to healing and being able to move forward. 

And these stages of grief apply equally to abstract and intangible losses—like a childhood we never got to have, family trips never planned, career paths not explored, the end of freedoms we enjoyed before becoming parents, or the passing of time and life paths not taken.  Infertility is an often under-appreciated cause of untold, and often unending, grief.  These losses of experiences never had count as much as any concrete losses we might experience (such as the death of loved ones or loss of a job).

Grieving is a healthy process- the many tears from which eventually set us free from our deep heartache and suffering.  So it’s more than okay to cry over tiny footprints… for as long as it takes.