It is Not About Healing From Your Grief

A new way to think about grief

Tomorrow will be the end of the seventh week since my wife Patricia died. Nothing during these last weeks has been what I thought it would be. After the first metastasis three months after the first surgery, my wife and I talked a lot about what I would do after her death. If those talks weren’t enough, I thought about it silently. I thought about it on my morning walk, sitting in the living room alone after she went to bed, and driving in the car.

In my head, I thought that by the end of the fourth week, I would be just fine. But I am in week seven, and I still have several days when I simply fall apart. Sometimes I could identify a trigger, but at other times I couldn't.

From the very first week, I have taken a very aggressive approach to dealing with my grief. Five days after she died, I forced myself to go to my first bereavement support group. And I mean that I forced myself because my instinct was to stay home and be sad.

I will not bore you with everything I did, but I want to share one thing: I did a lot of research and reading, and I still read a lot about grief. What I learned is that there is no timeline for the grief journey. No roadmap tells you to do this during week one, then during week two, and then these things in week three. While there is no timeline or roadmap, we can still make choices. I chose to take action despite the overwhelming impulse to do nothing.

An AHA! Moment

I recently subscribed to a newsletter by Sue Deagle on Substack titled The Luminist. In my email this morning was an article titled “#160 - The Lighthouse Effect.” I quickly saw that the article was about a retreat for board members of Experience Camps for Grieving Children. Since I am dealing with the death of my wife of 48 years, you might wonder why I would continue reading the article.

But here’s the thing. Regardless of who your loved one was/is, dealing with grief is universal. There may be subtle differences between someone who lost a child, someone who lost a parent, and someone who lost a spouse. But at the end of the day, we are all dealing with loss. So, I read everything, never knowing what kernel of wisdom I might find. And boy, did I find wisdom. Not a kernel but a boulder of wisdom.

Towards the end of her article, she wrote:

“They didn’t show us what it looks like when you’ve “healed” from loss to become this sparkling new superhuman (or monk). Rather, they showed us what it looks like when you’ve just integrated it into who you are. Healing suggests completion, a before-and-after where you emerge on the other side transformed but finished. Integration suggests something ongoing, alive, woven into the fabric of who you’re still becoming.

I had to reread this paragraph four or five times before I could move on. And each time I read it, I had to stop and think about what this meant to me.

Before reading this statement, I thought about my grief journey in terms of “when will I get through this?”, “When will it get better?”, “How do I heal from this?” and “How do I figure out who I am without Patricia?”

After some thought, I realized that if I move from “healing” to integration, those questions change.

“When will I get through this?”

The integrated version changes to “How can I walk with this grief in a way that honors my love and supports my life going forward?”

This shifts the goal from getting past grief to learning how to live alongside it. It removes the finish line and replaces it with companionship.

“When will it get better?”

The integrated version changes it to: “What might make this day or this moment a little more bearable, meaningful, or connected?”

Instead of waiting for a future turning point, integration invites you to pay attention to small, lived moments of ease, connection, and meaning as they arise, without expecting permanence.

“How do I heal from this?”

The integrated version becomes “How can I allow this loss to reshape me without letting it define all of me?”

This acknowledges that you will be changed, but that you also get a say in how you are changed. Healing suggests a return; integration acknowledges transformation.

“How do I figure out who I am without Patricia?”

The integrated version is “Who am I becoming now, with Patricia still woven into the story of my life?”

This is perhaps the most profound shift. It refutes the idea that her presence must be in the past tense. It views identity not as rebuilding from scratch, but as evolving—holding your love for her as part of the foundation.

Conclusion

Thanks to Sue’s article, as I sit here at the end of week seven, I can see that grief isn’t something I will someday “finish.” There is no version of myself waiting on the other side with all the pieces neatly put back together. Instead, I am learning slowly, unevenly, sometimes painfully, that grief is becoming part of who I am. Not as a burden I must shed, but as a truth I can carry with tenderness.

Integration doesn’t mean I stop missing Patricia. It doesn’t mean that I stop crying. It means I allow the love we shared to keep shaping me, even in her absence. It means I let my days unfold without demanding that they add up to progress. It means I let myself become someone new who still loves her, still speaks her name, still feels her absence and her influence in equal measure.

If there is a path forward, perhaps this is it: learning to live a life big enough for both the love that remains and the grief that follows. Not choosing one or the other but allowing both to weave themselves into the person I am now becoming.

And maybe that is the real work. It is not healing from grief, but integrating Patricia’s place in my heart into every step I take from here.