Dr. Kenneth Doka reminds us that “there is little work more difficult than [that of] working through grief.” Doing the work of grief involves having to un-learn the patterns and rhythms that have governed our lives with our loved ones – the daily phone call to mom, the bedtime routine we have undertaken each night with our spouse for 20+ years…
This work involves literally re-wiring our brains to create a new understanding of the world and our connection to a loved one who is no longer accessible in this world.
It’s hard.
And at the same time, it can be hard to recognize that it is work – especially for individuals who may have been in a caregiving role. When compared to the obvious labor of caring for a loved one – bathing, changing, managing medications, transportation, etc. – grief work is, in many ways, intangible. In many ways, it’s easy to experience the relief of being able to set down that burden of caregiving, without realizing that we have simply exchanged it for the more nebulous burden of learning how to carry our grief.
This is where spoon theory comes into play.
Originally developed by Christine Miserandino in 2003 as a way of describing life with a chronic illness, spoon theory can provide us with a valuable framework for understanding the work of grief. At its most basic level, the spoon theory posits that each of us starts with a finite number of ‘spoons’ in our day. These spoons represent the amount of mental, physical, and emotional energy that we have at our disposal – and everything we do in our day, we use up a spoon (or two, or three). When we have used all our spoons for the day, we can sometimes borrow against tomorrow’s spoons, but eventually – like over-drafting on your bank account – you run out of spoons to borrow.
When a loved one dies and we are no longer in a caregiving role, we may find ourselves trying to budget this allotment of spoons differently. If I have a budget of 10 spoons and 4 of them were dedicated to caregiving tasks, after the death we may think that those 4 spoons we used for caregiving are now free energy for us to tap into. Often, though, the reality is that these spoons are already spoken for.
These are the spoons that allow us to do the necessary work of grief. While that work may feel intangible on the day-to-day, with spoon theory, it becomes easier to see all the ways in which we are expending our energy. Part of doing the work of grief and allowing ourselves to heal requires that we recognize and accommodate these shifts in our energy expenditure.
For further information on spoon theory, grief work, and being mindful of how we budget our limited spoons as grieving individuals, check out Suzanne Elvidge’s article on The Widow’s Handbook.
