There are a great number of analogies that make up our grief lexicons: grief is like glitter – it gets everywhere and sticks to everything. Grief is like a ball in a box. A stone in your pocket. A wave. An ocean. A wound.
When I think of grief, I always think of beach glass.
Those smoothed-down, colorful little pebbles start with something breaking – a shattered bottle, a life, a colorful jar. The shards are jagged and sharp-edged and require careful handling. If you pick it up the wrong way, it can wound.
Fresh grief can shatter us; the broken pieces don’t fit right, they cut and jab at our soft places. That loss? That broken glass? It hurts.
So, we surrender it to the waves.
In the same way that the ebb and flow of the waves starts to wear down the sharp edges of a shard of glass, the shifting tides of our grief smooth the rough edges of a broken heart. The passing of time and the tumbling of those waves reshapes our grief into something softer, more organic. Something that doesn’t hurt quite as much to hold.
Sometimes, we can take those little nodules of worn-smooth glass and turn them into something beautiful, making meaning out of what was broken. And sometimes, we simply carry the glass tucked away in a pocket – sometimes forgotten but still ever-present, there to touch and turn over like a worry stone between our fingers.
For free grief support resources from Angela Hospice, including our calendar of support groups and workshops, we invite you to visit our Grief Care page. You reach our Grief Care Team by phone at 734.464.3277.
