{"id":897,"date":"2023-10-04T12:49:44","date_gmt":"2023-10-04T17:49:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/refocusingwido.wpenginepowered.com\/?p=897"},"modified":"2025-03-31T18:10:19","modified_gmt":"2025-03-31T23:10:19","slug":"dealing-with-cumulative-grief","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/refocusingwidows.org\/es\/dealing-with-cumulative-grief\/","title":{"rendered":"Dealing with Cumulative Grief"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Dealing with Cumulative Grief<\/strong><\/h2>\n

Today I\u2019d like to discuss something that may be unfamiliar to you: Cumulative Grief. Let me preface this by saying a couple of things. First, I\u2019m not a grief counselor or a professional in this area. I just read a lot and love passing on the information that I believe will help you. Second, I learned that Cumulative Grief is not actually an official diagnosis, but it is very much a reality for most of us!<\/p>\n

This discovery actually began for me about a year ago, when I found myself feeling extremely sad and exhausted. Dave had been gone over three years, so it seemed as though I should be much better than I felt like I was. I decided to be intentional about trying to discover the deeper root of these emotions. As I prayed and thought, the Lord led me to make a list of all the people in my life \u2013 parents, close friends, mentors, and ministry partners \u2013 who had died in the past four or five years.<\/p>\n

I started to write my list, and the longer I wrote, the more I cried. It began with my son-in-law\u2019s father a year before Dave started his journey with cancer. We were a very close extended family, and he was diagnosed and gone a little over a month later. Next came my Dad, and one year later, Dave\u2019s cancer diagnosis. Ten months later Dave\u2019s Dad died, and one month later, his Mom died. And in-between we spent three weeks in the hospital. Seven months later, Dave died, and within the next two years eight more close friends and ministry mentors went to be with Jesus. All in all, more than a dozen people close to me had died in a four-year stretch, and in the midst of it we were dealing with multiple surgeries, chemo, radiation, and everything that comes with it.<\/p>\n

There really hadn\u2019t been time to grieve any of those losses. They just kept piling one on top of the other, and I just kept putting one foot in front of the other. It felt like the tsunami wave finally crashed over me, and there was no way to swim out of it. I\u2019m guessing that many of you have had similar experiences, so I set about to find out what we could do to manage it.<\/p>\n

Let\u2019s start with a definition: Cumulative grief results when we have multiple losses flooding over us in a short period of time. It may be difficult, or even impossible, to grieve each loss, so we keep going, and over time the unprocessed grief piles up. It can feel like there are so many losses, we don\u2019t know where to begin the actual grieving process! The emotions from the first loss will naturally spill over into the second loss. If there\u2019s a third or more in short succession, each one floods into the next, making each ensuing loss more difficult to handle. This situation is also sometimes known as Complicated Grief, or Compounded Grief.<\/p>\n

Here are a few things that you should know about cumulative grief:<\/p>\n