John Pavlovitz: The Grieving Need You Most After the Funeral

John Pavlovitz writes about the importance of support and companionship when the shock of grief begins to wear off. "One of the truths I discovered, that when you lose someone you love—people show up. Almost immediately they surround you with social media condolences and texts and visits and meals and flowers. They come with good hearts, with genuine compassion, and they truly want to support you in those moments. The problem, is that you’re neither prepared nor particularly helped by the volume then. The early days of grief are a hazy, dizzying, moment by moment response to a trauma that your mind simply can’t wrap itself around. You are, what I like to call a Grief Zombie; outwardly moving but barely there. You aren’t really functioning normally by any reasonable measurement, and so that huge crush of people is like diverting thousands of cars into a one lane back road—it all overwhelms the system. You can’t absorb it all. Often it actually hurts...Just as the shock begins to wear off and the haze is lifted and you start to feel the full;gravity of the loss; just as you get a clear look at the massive crater in your heart—you find yourself alone.
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The Grieving Need You Most After the Funeral