17/11/2021
Grief. Please read. You will understand just that little bit more after reading this analogy.
Imagine your life is a box and the grief you feel is a ball inside of the box. Also inside the box is a pain button.
In the beginning, when the loss is so fresh and new, the grief that many people feel is overwhelming and large. It’s so large, in fact, that every time you move the box — moving through your every day life — the grief ball can’t help but hit the pain button.
The ball rattles around the box at random times of the day, hitting the pain button every time. This is how many people initially experience loss. You can’t control it and you can’t stop it. The pain just keeps coming pretty regularly, no matter what you do or how much others try and comfort you. The pain a person experiences may feel unrelenting and never-ending.
Over time after years of dealing with loss, the ball starts to shrink on its own.
You still go through life and the grief ball still rattles around inside the box. But because the ball has gotten smaller, it hits the pain button a little less often. You almost feel like you can go through most days without even having the pain button hit. But when it does hit, it can be completely random and unexpected. Like when you’re washing the pots, having a shower or when you come across their favorite video or TV show. The pain button still delivers the same amount of pain no matter how large or small the ball is.
Most people never forget the loss they experienced. But over time, the ball becomes so small that it rarely hits the pain button. When it does, it is still as painful and hard to understand as to why it feels the same as the first day you experienced the trauma. But the frequency of the hits has decreased significantly. This gives a person more time in-between each hit, time used to recover and feel “normal” again.
Time also allows our hearts to heal and to begin to remember the person as they were in life.
When I heard this, I went ‘’Wow’’ because the ball in the box is exactly how grief is. It really has got it down to a T. Just because one person is smiling right now doesn’t mean they will be smiling in 10 minutes time, when that balls strikes the box. Always be kind. It really does cost nothing ❤️
