Coping with emptiness after loss of a loved one

October 6, 2022 10:32 AM

For the last several months I have been coping with a very significant loss. The grief has improved, however the sadness and longing don’t seem to change. There is now a heaviness to life and a feeling that most things are insignificant. I am interested in hearing from folks who have been able to overcome/manage these types of feelings. I would also like to know when folks who used grief counseling felt they were ready to stop. Thank you.

For the last several months I have been coping with a very significant loss. The grief has improved since the first few months and I can take care of day to day life, however the sadness and longing don’t seem to change. There is now an emptiness that seems permanent, in my life and in me. I know that in some ways I am forever changed. It’s hard to articulate but there is now a heaviness to life and a feeling that most things are insignificant. This is not my first experience of loss and grief.

I am interested in hearing from folks who have been able to overcome/manage these types of feelings. Specifically, how long it took for you to adjust to a new life without the loved one and if and how you found meaning or joy in your life in your new normal.

Finally, I have done about 4 months of grief counseling and found it very helpful early on. It was helpful to be able to share the specific experience of the loss and the caretaking, and have my experience and feelings affirmed. It was also helpful for developing strategies to reestablish some routines and set goals when I was having a hard time with basic day to day living. I don’t need to talk about those things anymore and now find most sessions are just me expressing my sadness to an affirming ear. For those who have used grief counseling, when did you decide to stop? Although I think the therapist is very good, at this point, I wonder if counseling no longer useful, as it doesn’t seem that there is anything that will ease the sadness but time.

Thanks for any thoughts.

posted by fies to Human Relations (6 answers total)

I lost my daughter. It took over a year and the best advice I had from people was that it would take...over a year.

I stopped grief counselling after a few weeks, but I joined a bereaved families group (Bereaved Families of Ontario; there's also Compassionate Friends I think). I stopped that after a few months; some people enjoy that support but for me it was holding me back.

What helped me the most was taking a one week workshop in my field and kind of pushing through how bad it felt (which it did at points). But basically...starting to reengage with the things I had loved prior to the loss, even though they were kind of...blah. It did help.

Hang in there.
posted by warriorqueen at 11:49 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

My mother, with whom I had a complicated relationship especially in her last years, died unexpectedly a little more than five years ago. In some ways it doesn't ever stop hurting.

It is probably only in the last two years that I stopped feeling the loss in a heavy sort of a way, although it still occasionally visits me when a memory arises or a significant date comes around on the calendar. The first year was very difficult, the next three progressively easier.

I had been in therapy already, and spent some seven or eight months talking about grief with my then-current therapist before a move to another state necessitated the ending of that relationship.

Two things helped: first, the idea of grief as something that visits and leaves repeatedly helped me to, in a sense, welcome it when it came and let it go when it would leave; second, a book of poems called The Art of Losing, which I dipped into over and over again when I needed to put some words to what I was feeling and thinking.

You're not alone.
posted by gauche at 11:58 AM on October 6, 2022 [3 favorites]

This recent thread on the blue may be helpful for you.
posted by mygothlaundry at 12:28 PM on October 6, 2022 [2 favorites]

I am very sorry for your loss. My mom died reasonably unexpectedly and I went for a series of sessions with a bereavement counsellor. It was a set number of free sessions as I recall so there was the opportunity to carry on if I was prepared to pay, but by that time came I was already done with it in terms of the help I was getting. I think it was 12 weeks, once a week. It was, as you mentioned, mainly a place to talk about my mom where I didn't have to manage anyone else's feelings, and to express my sadness and pain and emptiness.

As to how long it took - Mom died on the 25th September 2005 and it seems to me like the sense of loss is still at the back of so many things I do even now - things I want her input on, things I see that I know she'd love or hate, conversations we should have had and didnt. But the immediacy of those feelings of loss has faded with time. You sort of grow your life round the gap that person filled, like a tree grows bark round the place where a branch was lost.

It took me a good few years to accommodate the really deep pain but I found myself able to start coping better after maybe 18 months to two years.
posted by Martha My Dear Prudence at 1:12 PM on October 6, 2022 [12 favorites]

But the immediacy of those feelings of loss has faded with time. You sort of grow your life round the gap that person filled, like a tree grows bark round the place where a branch was lost.

This is perfect.
posted by gauche at 2:03 PM on October 6, 2022 [5 favorites]

Response by poster: Thank you all for the responses and kindness.
posted by fies at 10:01 AM on October 7, 2022