Mainstream ideas about healing are wrong
Fortuitously and unfortunately, Glenn Greenwald (the journalist who published the Snowden revelations ten years ago) wrote about grief last year when his husband passed away (at the age I am now) after a long, hospitalized illness that "came out of the blue" (not even Greenwald could voice suspicion about the COVID jabs). Greenwald's words about grief are direct, less curated than his usual work (I say this as a positive thing, not as a criticism), and contain thoughts I don't usually hear about this subject our culture likes to pretend ends after the funeral even though, at least in my experience, it doesn't even start until all the flowers have died and the casseroles have all been eaten.
Greenwald says, "It keeps getting worse – harder not easier – with each passing day and each passing week. I know that it will begin to get better or at least more manageable at some point, but that can and will happen only once the reality is internalized, a prerequisite for healing and recovery, but the internalization that someone is really dead - that there's absolutely nothing you can do to reverse that - requires ample time given its enormity." Amen.
Twelve years is not "ample time" for me regarding my grandfather's death. I wasn't emotionally close to him - I wasn't emotionally close to anyone in my family - but I love old people and I love stability and I thought things would never change so it's hard to get my brain to accept that change is the only constant in life and even harder to get my heart to accept that the lilacs I smell on my walk around my neighborhood were not planted and tended by Pop, that no lilac ever will be again and if there are any still alive that were cared for by him, they would not be anywhere near where I am now. It's hardest to accept that this--the smell of lilacs, the sight of "painted" (striped) petunias, hearing a Georgia accent--still bringing me to tears is okay.
That grief doesn't have to be correlated to how close you were to the person you lost; it can sometimes just be about the permanent change in your life now. That grief doesn't always have an end point and that you might still have just as much emotion over a decade later as you did the day it happened. And that this culture, with its obsession with youth, conformity, and destroying anything over five years old, is just wrong. That tears still come when you encounter something that reminds you of the person who is gone (for now, if they died in Christ, but it's still "forever" on this side of the new heavens and the new earth, lucky for them!) is not a sign that you still "need healing." It's actually a sign that you're more healed than this present age and this present culture would have you be. And that is more than okay.