{"id":229,"date":"2004-01-31T11:13:57","date_gmt":"2004-01-31T19:13:57","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/01\/31\/we-need-to-grieve\/"},"modified":"2026-01-21T16:17:26","modified_gmt":"2026-01-22T00:17:26","slug":"we-need-to-grieve","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/2004\/01\/31\/we-need-to-grieve\/","title":{"rendered":"We Need to Grieve"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Grief is a natural process, one which our culture pressures us to either avoid or process quickly with the assistance of therapy.  I&#8217;ve been reading Anne Lamott&#8217;s book, <a href=\"http:\/\/allconsuming.net\/item.cgi?isbn=0385496095\">Traveling Mercies:  Some Thoughts on Faith<\/a>; in one chapter she writes about her experience grieving the death of a dear friend as well as the dissolution of a romantic relationship:<\/p>\n<blockquote><p>\nAll those years I fell for the great palace lie that grief should be gotten over as quickly as possible and as privately.  But what I&#8217;ve discovered since is that the lifelong fear of grief keeps up in a barren, isolated place and that only grieving can heal grief; the passage of time will lessen the acuteness, but time alone, without the direct experience of grief, will not heal it.  &#8230;I&#8217;m pretty sure that it is only by experiencing that ocean of sadness that we come to be healed &#8212; which is to say, that we come to experience life with a real sense of presence and spaciousness and peace.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>I&#8217;ve been fortunate in my four decades to be spared the loss of a human beloved through death, but I <em>have<\/em> said goodbye to a number of cat companions.  The last one was especially tragic for reasons I won&#8217;t enumerate here, but I did experience what Lamott is describing.  Grief is harrowing, but in its way, the experience cleanses the soul.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Grief is a natural process, one which our culture pressures us to either avoid or process quickly with the assistance of therapy. I&#8217;ve been reading Anne Lamott&#8217;s book, Traveling Mercies: Some Thoughts on Faith; in one chapter she writes about her experience grieving the death of a dear friend as well as the dissolution of [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[28,3,31],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-humanities","category-science","category-social-science"],"post_mailing_queue_ids":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13105,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229\/revisions\/13105"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.kathrynpetroharper.com\/mindfullife\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}