Grief feels like a tornado that comes tearing & roaring into one’s life, destroying everything it touches. It is possible at times to say that the conditions look favorable for a chance of tornadoes, but there’s no way to predict ahead of time exactly where a tornado will strike. Grief is similar. There are days or situations that I can say are favorable for grief to hit me, but it is still overall unpredictable. Just like it would be so much easier if we could confine a tornado to a specific path or direction (so we could make sure that people stay away from that area); it would also be much easier to work through grief if we could confine it to a specific area or path. However, it doesn’t work like that.
Grief moves through our lives in whatever path, direction, and time that it chooses. This whirling dervish of emotions and memories destroys anything in it’s path and can bump into any area of our lives.
Also, our own twister of grief, will affect our lives in ways different from those around us. Even though 2 people may have experienced the same loss, the path that the twister of grief takes will be different in each of their lives. Tornadoes come in various sizes, shapes, and strengths. So does grief. For some people, grief is a large, wedge-shaped tornado that tears through their life leaving a mile-wide path of utter destruction.
For others, grief is a thin rope-like tornado that hits with pin-point accuracy and dissipates quickly.
Grief can hit one person while leaving the person standing next to them unscathed just like a tornado can level one home and leave the neighboring home untouched.
Other times, grief can seem to level entire communities in much the same way that massive tornado outbreaks do.
My grief at this time feels like a monster wedge-shaped tornado. It is destroying everything it touches and it is bumping into every part of my life! No aspect of my life has been left unscathed. This EF-5 tornado hit without warning! There was no preparedness for it … although I don’t know that there is much preparedness that can be done for an EF-5 tornado. It is still going to level your home, you, and anything else in it’s path.
It will suck you up in the whirling madness and spit you out whenever and wherever it decides to do so. That’s how I feel … like I’ve been sucked up, spun around within the madness of emotions, getting impaled by debris, and spit back to earth.
Then the tornado decides to touch down, suck me up, & start all over again. Each time I get struck by or impaled by another piece of debris, I am less likely to survive. Each injury weakens me and makes it harder to fight the next time the tornado touches down. I need to know how to get out of the path of this tornado, but so far the unpredictability of it’s path has prevented me from being able to do so. I can’t survive this tornado much longer!
Our tornadoes of grief, while having some similarities, are all unique as well. They are different in their intensity, path, duration, precision. It’s important to remember that my grief isn’t identical to your grief. There may be some aspects that are similar, but even those similarities play out differently in each of our lives. That doesn’t mean we can’t support each other through grief, but we need to be cognizant of the fact that we can respond to the same loss in very different ways. The main commonality in grief seems to be the unpredictability of it.
victoriouslybroken 