Seven Tasks of Grieving

It's important to actively work to integrate and resolve our grief, not to just passively experience your reactions to it. Grief carries us until we learn to carry it. There are tasks in grieving and the sanctuary is a good place to work on them.
Some of these tasks are:

• to express all the feelings over this loss: anguish, longing, relief, anger, depression, numbness, despair, aching, guilt, confusion, and often unbearable pain
• to let the nonnegotiable and excruciating reality sink in that you will never again be in the physical presence of your deceased loved one
• to review your relationship from the beginning and to see the positive and negative aspects of the person and the relationship
• to identify and heal your unresolved issues and your regrets
• to explore the changes in your family and other relationships
• to integrate all the changes into a new sense of yourself and to take on healthy new ways of being in the world without this person
• to form a healthy new inner relationship with this person and to find new ways of relating to him or her.