What I Learned from Grief That Changed My Life

The holidays are amazing. It's a great time of year for you to have a little more time than you normally would have to celebrate the season with family and friends. It is, um, a time when we're reminded to be grateful, a time where we're reminded to be thankful, a time where we're reminded about the beauty of the birth of Christ and the gift that we have of fellowship with God because of his entry into this world. It is a magical time. The lights are sparkling, the Christmas music is playing, the malls are decorated, our neighborhoods are adorned with reminders of the season that we're in. The same way that the malls are decorated and our doorsteps are beautified, they all serve to remind us about 'tis the season. We have, many of us do, lots of memories surrounding these seasons, good or bad, beautiful or ugly. These seasons mark many of the mountains or valleys of our life. Sometimes our valleys are caused by expectations not met or stress and strain with people that are hard to get along with, or our to-do list being 3 times as long. The mountains are the laughter that we've experienced with family and friends, the gifts that we've received, the trips that we've taken. And then those beautiful mountains of memories are often darkened and a shadow is cast because we also are reminded of memories that are adorned, decorated by the sting of loss that we feel during the season. My Thanksgiving and Christmas season is adorned with memories of my mother. Her absence as my mother is felt in so many ways, but particularly around the holiday season, it is tripled, quadrupled, and whatever multiplied times 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, or 10 would be.

It's 10x'd. Because it was so beautiful.

She was so beautiful. The memories were so beautiful. She enjoyed everything about the holidays. So this stretch from Thanksgiving to Christmas is littered with all the things we don't do the way we did them when she was here, or the beauty of us all being together in the same home, in her home on Christmas Day with the Al Green album playing and the smell of Christmas dinner cooking and wrapping of gifts and holiday movies and sitting together on the couch or going to the mall and watching holiday movies and wearing ugly Christmas sweaters. She had this Christmas sweater that had bells on it. So she just sounded like Mrs.

Claus, literally, in the hallways of North Park Mall, which was her favorite mall to go to.

So people will ask me, and they have asked me over the years, how have I— it's usually, how are you doing? How are you dealing with particularly that first year that she wasn't here?

How are you doing?

I don't really remember how I've answered over the years, but I can speak for how I'm doing now. What I know now is the same thing that many of you already know, that grief is a constant friend. That when it onsets, it feels like an enemy. It is something you don't want. It is something you don't want to feel. It is something you don't want to experience. It is something that you don't know how to handle. You don't go through a grief preparation class in life. It happens, and whether you are ready for it or not, it It's like a dagger that goes through your heart and then slices down, splitting you in two from the top of your head to the bottom of your feet. And you're left still being expected to live separated, separated from your loved ones, separated from the experience, separated from the memories, but yet everything's still connected. And somehow you find yourself still alive. The rest of life when you have a significant loss is spent learning how to live with that loss, not as an enemy, but as a friend. The thing that stitches you together slowly is what you learn about coping well. I am very well aware that grief and loss comes in all kinds of forms. We think about grief and loss during the holidays, often as it relates to our family members, our mothers, our fathers, our grandmothers, our aunts, our sisters, our brothers, our friends, our children. But grief and loss takes so many forms. It is deeply cutting when you feel alone, not necessarily because somebody died, but because you're in a city you don't know. Not around the people that you love, and the loneliness there is real. Grief and loss can come from financial instability, that you are entering the holiday season, the most spectacular time of the year, but you are the most worried and anxious you've ever been because things aren't adding up right. Grief and loss can come from dreams that are unfulfilled. This was the year you thought that God was going to answer that prayer and deliver that spouse, answer that prayer and bring healing, answer that prayer and give you clarity, answer that prayer and allow you to finish. And here you are at another year, still not married, still not in a good friend group, still not having checked the box with the things you wanted to do. And so you grieve the loss of expectation, and you grieve the loss of a dream and you grieve the loss of what you wanted.

We grieve the people that we love that are gone because we wanted them.

We wanted them to be with us forever. We wanted them to be within arm's reach, phone call away. We wanted to feel their arms, the pulse in their wrists. Even as my mother was passing away, I had my hand on her heart.

I wanted to feel her heartbeat until it stopped beating.

I had my hand on her heart.

I felt her last beat.

That's what we want.

That's what we want.

Grief and loss comes from not having what we want. And I don't want anyone to tell you that what you want doesn't matter. I don't want you to feel like, because— well, I know people are dealing with really difficult things, and so I'm not going to cry over this. You know, I didn't get the promotion that I wanted, and I'm really sad about that. I'm going to be in this job working for this same boss another year, but I'm I'm not going to complain about that because this friend over here is struggling with the loss of her mom, right? No, you have the right to grieve. As one of our inner circles is saying right now, as I look at the chat, the loss of expectation, whether that be the loss —of the expectation that you would have your mother here for another 20 years, or that you would finally be in a home, or that you would be out of debt, or that you would have lost the weight or battled and won the victory over addiction, that your marriage would be in a better place, that your children would have come back to the Lord. You get to grieve that this year is ending and you don't have what you want.

Don't let anybody steal, minimize, or take away the reality of your grief.

But how do you cope with it? How do you, how do you cope with it?

What do you, what do you do? Well, the answers here are as long and wide as the earth is round. And I know that each person will find a way in their own way, if you choose to pursue health, to figure that out.

But I want to give you some thoughts about how you can cope with grief and cope with loss of a person, of a loved one, of expectation this season.

I have— she's still there.

There is this chapter, chapter 13, It's called A Labor of Love: Finding Purpose in Your Pain. And I quoted myself, and this book was written before my mom died, 2 years before. And some of the things that I wrote here are still true. When you know your pain has a purpose, it changes your perspective. Getting to the girl who is in you may require pressing through pain. I've experienced all kinds of births, so I can testify to the fact that childbirth will hurt. I've done in the hospital with no drugs, birth at home with a midwife, at— in a birthing tub, in the hospital with an epidural, a C-section, a VBAC, you name it, I've done it. Each one hurt every stinking time. It doesn't matter how you give birth though, it hurts before, during, and after. However, when you're done, you get a whole person. To emerge from your own person. There is going to be some major discomfort involved, but the pain is a part of the process of bringing forth life. And if you skip the pain, we skip part of the process. I hate to tell you this, but your pain, however it comes about, is a part of your journey. You may wish it hadn't have happened. You may not want to relive it, remember it, or rejoice over it, but it is a part of who you are. It's a part of your experience. It's a part of the stuff that God has allowed and will allow to impact your soul. So if you want to fully live with your life, you must be willing to embrace your pain.

Your quest to rescue your life will require your labor of love. In order to cope well with grief and loss of any kind, you're going to have to embark on this labor of love.

You're going to have to let yourself be loved. First and foremost, that means you have to allow yourself to be enveloped by all of you being available to be seen and cared for and touched. So the way you start that process for me is being honest. You have to be honest that you're hurting. You can't cope with something that doesn't exist. How can you be honest? You journal, you talk about it, you cry over it. I was sharing with a friend of mine yesterday that another friend of mine, when she lost her mom, she was telling me about some things that she did. And every year on her mother's birthday, she and her sisters would go— one of her sisters now lived in her mother's house— to the mother's house, in her mother's kitchen, and they would make her favorite recipes and talk about her and allow themselves to cry over her and even to let the tears drop in the food. They would hug each other. They made room. They left room to wail. To be on the floor, to hug, to be covered with a blanket. They watched her favorite movies. They let it all come out, but they were in a community and an environment where their grief was received. And the first person that needs to be able to receive your grief is you. Make space to grieve. There are so many grief support groups that are around in churches, in your communities. Find one. If you don't know how to grieve well, find a grief support group where there is someone who is not only there to love on you as you let it spill out, they've been trained to love on you. Get a therapist. Like, if you know this time of year does a number on you, go to talk to someone just so that you can, in the safety of another space, get out of your chest and out of your mouth and out of your heart and out of your mind.

How you actually feel about the loss in this season, because you cannot cope with something that you won't even acknowledge exists.

You have to make space for it. You're not going to grieve well if you're too busy. You're not going to grieve well if you don't want to feel it. You're not going to grieve well if you run away from it.

You have to shake hands with it. You have to welcome it as a part of who you are.

It's a part of something that is creating beauty in you, whether you recognize it or not. It's a part of how you learn to be compassionate, a part of how you learn to value what really matters, a part of how you now know how to better spend your time. It's a part of how you learn. It's feedback. What actually do you care about? What actually do you want? What actually do you need? Because sometimes what grief teaches us is that we had expectation in an area that we were never designed to have expectation in. And so when we lose it and we feel the loss, we learn we should have never put so much value on that to begin with.

Grief is a teacher, but it can't teach you if you don't go to class. So you have to be willing to feel it.

It has to course in your body as something that you know when it arrives.

I was on a plane yesterday and I felt it rising and I didn't cry, but I felt it. I felt the weight on my chest and the tingle in my forearms, and I felt the rising of the closing of my throat as I thought, this week marks Thanksgiving, and my mother's birthday is December 1st, and that's the day when I will mark the season by putting up my tree because that's how I remember her. And as it closes and it comes, I felt it rising because I'm familiar with it. I know what it feels like. If I push it down and I don't feel it, then I don't learn from it.

Let me tell you what I've learned, then I'll give you some other practical ways to cope with it. I have learned that I can, and I have the power to create the most magical, palpable, memorable experiences in the lifetime of my friends, my family, my children, my grandchildren, that I get to be the architect of anchors in their life, that I have the power, the skill of hand, and the desire of heart to, in the simplest of ways, to create river rocks in the river of their existence. I have learned that. Because I now, in her absence, experience what I now see she did that is no longer happening because she's not here.

I learned that.

I learned that in this season that I can, with or without other people, operate out of overflow and engage in the things that I enjoy. I learned that from her. And I learned that she started doing that in the holiday season because it was her birthday month. And then as she got older, I now remember her saying, I choose to operate in overflow because she decided to take the holiday season and plant that throughout her life all year long. I learned that lesson from her, that you— even though I'm still working on it— that you slow down to smell the roses because they don't only bloom in December. I learned that. So coping with grief and loss looks like planting myself firmly in the season, knowing when it's starting, knowing when it's hitting me, and also embracing the lessons I've learned.

And I think about it, but I have to make room to do that.

So getting it out, being honest, drawing near to other people who will welcome and hold space for your grief. And if you don't have those kind of people, you do it for yourself first, and then you go find them. If you don't have a therapist, can't afford a therapist, you talk to a pastor and you say, "I struggle with grief.

Is there someone in this church who can walk with me and help me to hold this season well?" You find a grief support recovery group.

Coping with grief well means being patient with yourself.

It means not rushing.

And in that, looking at ways to honor the memory of those you love.

When you are coping with grief and loss of expectations, it means holding space for what you wanted, why you wanted it, why you're disappointed, and what you can do to fill the space with what you have in your hand.

My children, most of the time, especially when they were little, after Christmas Day, with all the toys that they'd been given and all the puzzles and the books and the new clothes and the things that I grabbed off the shelves at Target a couple of nights before they closed down for Christmas.

My little children would play with boxes.

All the things on the floor, they would play with.

And don't let those boxes be big.

They would enjoy them.

Coping with grief and loss looks like playing with the boxes.

So let's just say you're experiencing loss this season, um, and you are grieving the financial expectation or the relational expectation or the career expectation or the progress expectation of school or job or career.

Play with the boxes. Dumb it down a little bit. Just bring it down.

If you can't do what you wanted to do financially, what can you do? If you can't have the person that you wanted to have, the relationship, the breakup happened, who do you have? If you didn't figure out how to finish that degree on time or to make progress toward that goal, what progress did you have? You play with the boxes. Hey there.

Do you ever feel like life is just too much, that there's a lot of things to do, not enough time to do everything in? And also when you have to prioritize— prioritization, what's that? Do you wanna live an intentional life and are struggling to figure out how to do that? Well, here's the deal. I wanna help you. I'm a coach who has put together a planner to help you have the best of planning an intentional life, couple with someone to help you do just that. My name is Chrystal Hurst, and this is The Full Circle Planner. I meet you at the beginning and the end of each year, at the beginning and end of each quarter, at the beginning and the end of each month to make sure that you are paying attention to your life, focusing on what matters, and putting the important things in the right order. Because sometimes, y'all, it's not just about a to-do list. It's about doing things well. And I can tell you, you will not be able to do things well if you don't look at your life. And sometimes we all need a little help to do that. So I've put the best of me as your coach in the best of a tool, a beautiful tool at that, to plan your life. I want you to get this planner. Let me help you plan your life so that you can live the life you love. Get your Full Circle Planner today.

There are so many things that I thought I would have my mother here to do. My grandmother lived to 97. My grandfather, her father, lived to 91 on my dad's side. My grandmother lived to be 80. My grandfather lived, um, well, well, well into his 80s.

He was 90 years old. I thought I had time.

And so my thought is, what did I not get? I, I lament the loss and grief of the conversations I didn't have, or the clarification I didn't get, or the season of celebration where I finally was in a season where I can afford to do some nicer things for her.

And I didn't get that.

So I choose to play with the boxes because you always get something. How many years did I have her? How many years and lessons did I learn? Every Christmas or birthday or holiday, I would give her a card Sometimes when I couldn't afford to do anything else, but I would write the mess out of those cards.

And as she would read my card, she would say, "Mm, you buy the best cards. You write the best words." If I look back and look at what I have, there are boxes to play with.

Coping with grief and loss looks like looking for the boxes. What does exist? What do you have? What is in your hands?

You look for it and you enjoy it.

My mother had a beautiful Christmas tree, multiple trees, and she reached a season of her life where she was able to have someone come decorate it. But I don't— as much as I loved her trees and loved her home, my favorite tree was the old ratty tree. Because now when I look back at it, when I look at the pictures, it was an old ratty tree. But there was this ornament that I really, really loved. It was this bird that would sing. And it was— she would always push it way back in the tree and I would stare at the tree, you know, in a tunnel through the lights to see this bird and listen to the birds sing. And she fretted all those years she couldn't have a designer tree, but the designer tree is not the little box.

The little box for me was the ratty tree with the bird that sang.

When my grandmother passed, I called and said, "I'm coming to see you." And that was on a Friday.

She was going into surgery. And on a Tuesday, the next Tuesday, when she was awake and remember that I was there, I was going to go. And she said, "I understand." She said, "I know you have small children and it's okay." And I said, "But I wish I was with you." And she said, "But I'm always with you.

I'm in you always." So little boxes. I have her cookie jar and her cake plate. And every first Sunday, I pull out the cookie jar, I pull out the cake plate, and she's with me. Little boxes. And I tell her great-grandchildren and her great-great-grandchildren, "Whose cookie jar is this?" And they say, "It's two mamas, right?" Yes. Because the little box is hospitality. The little box is the joy that kids have stealing the the cookies out of the cookie jar when I see that and their parents don't, and I let them.

Little boxes.

Coping with grief and loss looks like this. It looks like letting the shower run when you feel it rising up and letting the water wash the tears away. And it's okay. Because grief magnified is love majored, expectations enlarged. It is hope for the future. We lean into that because this is the beauty of life, leaning into the things that are larger in life. So this season, even though you may feel Sadness. Take care of yourself. Leave room. Plan ahead for the margin you know you're gonna need. Enjoy traditions around the things that you value because of the love that you've lost. Look for the little boxes, the little joys, the little things to celebrate that are good and right even though expectation has not been met. Coping with grief and loss does not look like being okay. Coping with grief and loss looks like acknowledging that you're not okay, that you wish they were here, or you wish this had happened, or you wish you weren't alone again, or you wish—

it says, "There's something I want." And acknowledging what you want or wanted to hold in your hands is a part of the acknowledgment of your heartbeat.

So when you get together with your family to cook and you remember Big Mama's meals, laugh and cry. When you hear everyone share— sharing their fondest memories and you don't want to share yours because you don't want to be a blubbering idiot, let the tears fall. When you find yourself upset because why is this my life, know that this is life for everyone at some points, many points in your life. You are going to lose something that you wanted. Recognize that it's okay for grief to intensify during the holidays, that you need to learn who you are and what you need so that you can set boundaries, communicate your needs, and plan ahead to communicate with others who may not know automatically what's going on. To have words Mom, what's wrong?

I'm thinking about your grandmother. I'm missing my mom.

I sent a podcast out into the world a week or two ago about mindfulness and gratitude. Practicing mindfulness and gratitude about what you had is a part of this too. Giving thanks, giving in advance for what you hope for is a part of this too.

Giving your heart away, placing it back into the hands of God, even when you're disappointed that he didn't deliver, is a part of this process too. Acknowledging when it is so overwhelming that you can't function and you need help therapist, counselor, doctor is a part of this too.

Removing the pride and the lack of humility and refusing to save face and joining that grief support group, that's a part of it too.

A friend of mine named Tamara started a group for girls who'd lost their mother.

And they meet every year to talk about their moms and they, they choose a group gift. And I know this because one year they gave me and Priscilla an apron and it says, "Lois's Daughters," because even though my mother isn't here, she's always in me.

She's with me. I will always be forever her firstborn girl. And grief simply is the gift of remembering.

Coping does not mean ignoring, reducing, silencing.

It means dealing with. And I want you to learn that making room for the rise of emotion during this season is a part of the journey because grief, whether it's a he or she, is a constant companion. But it is a gift to have this constant companion because you learn. And the journey of this constant companion being with you is a labor of love and a gift you give yourself.

Choose how you're going to handle it. You get to choose. You get to celebrate the memory. You get to create a new tradition. You get to share stories and cherish moments with other people who get it. You get to prioritize self-care. You get to be intentional about your social commitments. These are the things that you get to do that grief invites you to, forces you to, teaches you to. And all of this can invite you into a journey of living better. If you don't hear me say anything else, know this: coping is not about reducing.

It is about exhaling and filling and infusing your life and this season with you.

And you are a compilation of all the joys that make you angry at all the losses, all the love that makes you upset with all the hurt.

But it takes both of them to make you a whole, top to bottom person. And learning to cope with the grief and loss that you've experienced in this season is a part of your journey. I hate that my mother's no longer here, but learning from her life and from my loss has made me better, deeper, fuller, more attentive, more compassionate, more empathetic.

It has 10x'd the ability of the Spirit of God to talk to me because I understand life more.

And even if it's not a gift that you want, the pain that you have from your loss of a loved one, an expectation, a dream, relational emptiness, it deepens. Your cistern to receive. So this holiday season, my hope and my wish for you is that you open your arms to receive and know that receiving all the good that comes from all the bad is a part of living your life well. So get your tissue and let the tears fall. Find your safe place and space, private or with people that you love. Find the coping mechanism that works best for you, or the list of mechanisms you need. And move through this season in power with purpose. And just know you are a part of an army of people who are doing the same. And how do I know? Because I'm in it marching with you. And you know, while I'm here, whatever or whoever you're grieving this season, Let's be honest, let's tell the truth, and let's speak out loud. What is their name? Who were they to you? What is it? What was your expectation? After you watch this video, go ahead and start your honesty journey in the comments right here. We're holding space for you as you hold space for yourself.