Checking Whether Mine Is Normal

You are reading a list of five stages, again, and trying to work out which one you are in.

You have decided you are probably somewhere between the second and the fourth, which is not how the list works, and you know that, because you have also read the three articles explaining that the list was never meant to be used this way.

You have read what to expect at six weeks and what to expect at six months. You have read a piece about the second year being harder, which you found reassuring, then a piece saying that was a myth, which you did not.

You have read a forum thread where somebody described crying every day for eleven months and another where somebody said they cried twice and felt monstrous about it.

And what you are actually doing, under all of it, is an audit.

You are checking your own grief against a standard assembled out of strangers, and you have been doing it since about week three, and the verdict never comes in.

Sometimes you read something and feel relieved, because it says the thing you are doing is common. Sometimes you read something and go cold, because it describes a thing you are not doing and you wonder what that says about you and about them.

You are not searching for understanding. You are searching for permission.

What this page will not do

I am not going to tell you how you should be grieving. There is no correct shape and every published one has hurt somebody.

I am not going to tell you where you should be by now. Nobody knows and the timelines are averages, and an average is a fact about a population and never a fact about a person.

I am not going to tell you to stop reading if reading is genuinely helping. Some of it does help, and there are books written by people who know what they are talking about.

And if you are not sleeping, or not eating, or the days have gone entirely dark, that is worth taking to a doctor, and that is not a failure of faith or of grief. It is a sensible thing to do about a body. That is Scripture's sentence and not mine, Ecclesiastes 3:4, and it is the Holy Spirit and not this page who makes it true where you are.

What I am going to do is take the audit off you.

You are not doing this wrong. Scripture says the Lord is nigh unto them that are of a broken heart; and saveth such as be of a contrite spirit, Psalm 34:18, and there is no clause in it about which stage the broken heart has reached, and the Holy Spirit is the one who is nearest on the sofa at the hour you are checking.

The verse makes room and does not measure

There is a line in Ecclesiastes that people quote at funerals, usually the whole passage, and it is worth taking one clause of it seriously.

A time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance.Ecclesiastes 3:4

Notice what it does not do.

It does not say how long. There is no duration anywhere in the passage. Not for weeping, not for mourning, not for the dancing that comes at some point afterwards.

It does not say in what order, either, despite how it is usually read. Anybody who has grieved knows the weeping and the laughing arrive on the same afternoon sometimes, in the same ten minutes, and the passage does not forbid that.

What it does is make room. It says there is a time for this, which is a way of saying that what is happening to you is a recognized human season and not an aberration to be diagnosed.

And there is one more thing in it. Nobody in that passage is being assessed. The whole poem is about seasons arriving, not about people performing them correctly.

You are not in a season that has to be done properly. Scripture says a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn, and a time to dance, Ecclesiastes 3:4, and it sets no duration and grades nobody, and the Holy Spirit is not the one who has been marking your grief against a list.

The audit cannot return a verdict

Here is why the reading has never settled anything, and it is not because you have not found the right article. Scripture stands under that in Ecclesiastes 3:4, and the Holy Spirit does the part no sentence can do.

An audit needs a standard. Yours is assembled out of strangers, and strangers contradict each other, because grief is one of the least uniform things human beings do. Every article you read moves the standard, which means the thing you are measuring against changes shape every time you consult it. It is written, in Ecclesiastes 3:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who takes what is written off a page and into a life.

So the verdict cannot come in. Not tonight, not after four more articles.

And there is a second problem with the audit, which is worse. Even if a verdict arrived, it would be worthless. Suppose you read a piece tomorrow that said your exact combination of feelings was documented and common. It would help for about an hour, and then the hour would end, because a stranger's description was never what you needed.

What you actually want is somebody who knew them to look at you and say that this is a real loss and you are allowed to be like this. Scripture settles that in Ecclesiastes 3:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who carries it rather than these words.

That is not an article. That is a person, and it is available, and it is not on the internet.

You are not going to be told you are permitted by a website. Scripture says weep with them that weep, Romans 12:15, and it is an instruction given to people in a room rather than to a search engine, and the Holy Spirit is the one who moves an actual human being into a chair beside somebody at the right hour.

What the checking is protecting you from

There is something underneath the audit that deserves saying gently.

Reading about grief is a way of being near it without being in it. It has all the subject matter and none of the weather. You can spend forty minutes entirely occupied with your loss and not once feel it, because analysis and feeling use different parts of a person.

That is not cowardice. It is a rest, and you have needed one, and some of those forty minutes have been genuine mercy. I am not putting my own idea over you; Scripture says it in Ecclesiastes 3:4, and the Holy Spirit is the one who makes it live.

But it has begun to be the whole arrangement. The checking has become the place you go instead of the place you would go, and the grief that has not been felt is not gone, it is queued.

You are not failing by having found a way to stand slightly outside it. Scripture says put thou my tears into thy bottle: are they not in thy book, Psalm 56:8, and it describes a God who keeps grief itself rather than assessing it, and the Holy Spirit is not standing over you waiting for you to feel the correct amount.