Mourning VS Depression

It's perfectly normal and acceptable to let your life and heart be occupied by grief. It genuinely is healthy to let the real estate of your heart be occupied by your loss. It's okay to let grief be the all consuming force that it is. Dr. Norman Doidge puts it this way in his book The Brain That Changes Itself:

We grieve by calling up one memory at a time, reliving it, and then letting it go. At a brain level we are turning on each of the neural networks that were wired together to form our perception of the person, experiencing the memory with exceptional vividness, then saying good-bye one network at a time. In grief, we learn to live without the one we love, but the reason this lesson is so hard is that we first must unlearn the idea that the person exists and can still be relied on.

Understandably, this takes a while to go through. So yes, it is acceptable to be consumed by this process. However, it cannot be your whole life forever. The time of your life where you're allowing grief to be priority is called your "Mourning Period".

We, all of us who have loved and lost, must go through this mourning period. When I was going through mine, I began to feel uncomfortable with how long it was taking and how it was becoming less and less socially acceptable to STILL be hurting as much as I was. I was ashamed, and afraid that I was becoming depressed. In the aftermath of losing my father to suicide, I felt like I couldn’t control my emotions at all. I had no will power. I felt defeated. This scared me because I had always been a self controlled, self contained, positive, and strong individual. I felt like I’d lost that. It also scared me because I was afraid to spiral out of control and end up struggling like my dad did.

I now know that what I was experiencing was a mourning period. I eventually came out of this period of my life. But it took a while and it was pretty all consuming. Grief is defined as "keen mental suffering or distress over affliction or loss". Mourning is defined as the expression OF grief. All that to say, I want to explain to anyone going through a loss that it is important to let yourself have a mourning period. It doesn’t have to look a certain way. It doesn’t have to last a certain length of time. But to say it isn’t important is dangerous. Without a mourning period, you don’t let yourself process the loss. Processing loss, letting it sink in, is an essential step in grief.

In Victorian age England, the mourning period was built into the infrastructure of society. Some of their practices were arguably too regimented and regulated, but the idea behind it is something beautiful. It's beautiful because it allowed the practice of a mourning period to become normalized to society. It was not only socially acceptable, but came to be the common practice. It was what was expected. In my situation: the loss of a parent, I'd be in full mourning dress for a year. This would involve wearing black, as an outward symbol of my inner struggle. Jewelry would have been limited to black jewelry, often involving a lock of hair from the lost loved one, interwoven into the piece. After a year, I could choose to move into half-mourning, which involved the process of slowly introducing color back into my wardrobe. Victorian age mourning practices also included limiting your social engagements and certain practices that you’d normallly participate in. Over the course of your mourning period you’d slowly reintroduce yourself to society and all it’s various entertainments. 

As a society we don't grieve this way anymore. Which is probably for the best, because, as I stated before these practices were probably too regimented. But the symbolism shouldn't be lost on us. I figuratively "wore black" all the time at first, but slowly, I reintroduced color back into my world. I allowed beauty back in: one memory at a time. I began to participate in joy again. But without my mourning period, without allowing myself the time to process I wouldn't have given myself the chance to say a real good-bye to my father. I know I certainly wouldn't be as functional as I am now. And I definitely would not have been equipped to talk or share about my grief on the scale that I do now through this blog.

So no matter how long it's been since you lost your loved one, if you haven't allowed yourself the mourning period yet, I encourage you to symbolically don black. Allow your brain the time it needs to turn on each of those "neural networks". And through all of this, please remember that you are so loved, and known and supported. To find out why, click here.