A lot of times, when grief overwhelms us, it can be difficult to know how to share grief with the people in our lives, especially with those who are non grievers. There are things that non grievers just don’t think about that may hit you full force in the face every single day. Most of the time, we retreat into a space where we just don’t want to share our feelings anymore because the response from everyone else is somehow not satisfying or nourishing to the rawness.
But sometimes, an occasion will arise where you do want to share or try to explain a little of what you might be experiencing inside. And this can be a nice, simple little way of doing that. We experience many emotions, not just grief, through our senses, which is something that everyone can relate to. If you know someone who responds more to sound, you could try explaining to them how grief effects you through a song. Lots of people are visual, so you could demonstrate through colors. I go into more detail through other examples below. But if you feel up to it, try this out as a way to explain to others, as well as yourself, what grief feels like for you.
Instructions:
You can use photos, writing, colors, sounds, foods, whatever you need to describe what the grief experience currently is for you. If you want to keep it simple, you can just write how you see and feel grief through your senses. If you are feeling more visual, try cutting out pictures or printing them off the internet. If you like cooking or crafting, you can use these to demonstrate through things like taste, smell and touch.
You don’t necessarily have to share your grief with others. You can do this alone and keep the results for yourself if you want to. But it can help you think of how to share with people in a way that they might understand you better. Or, this would be a good exercise to share results with your grief support system, too, such as therapy or support groups.
Sight/Visual
If you were visualizing grief and wanted to create a physical representation of it, what do you think you would choose? Here are some examples and prompts to show how you can visually represent the emotion of grief and how it affects you inside.
What if grief was…
- A color? What color would you choose it to be?
- An animal? What animal represents grief to you? Would the animal appear menacing or reflective and mysterious?
- A place? If you thought of a place to show grief, what would it look like? Would it be an abandoned building, or a spot in nature?
- A piece of art? Is there a famous painting in history that accurately portrays the emotion of grief for you?
- A symbol? If you picked a symbolic representation of grief, what would that look like?
Audio/Sound
Some people are better able to describe a feeling through their sense of hearing.
If grief was…
- A sound? What would you hear it as? Would it be loud? Would it be soft? Scary? Would it just resemble a white noise machine?
- A song? I use the idea of music and grief in this article on the power of music. What would the emotion of grief sound like to you if it were music? Would it have a nature/new age sound? Would it be haunting?
Touch/Feel
To describe grief as a touch might sound both interesting and odd. But many people are highly effected by the sense of touch. Some find it very necessary while others are repulsed by too much physical contact from anything.
If grief was…
- A temperature that you could feel, what would it feel like? Would it be below freezing like a wintery, blustery wind? Would it be a volcanic heat and boiling over?
- A piece of clothing you could wear, would it be soft? Scratchy? Woolly? Something that your loved one wore?
- Anything else you could touch? Would it be wet and slimy? Sticky? Would it feel like sandpaper?
- Located in a specific place in your body, where would it be? Does it tighten your stomach? Create heaviness in your chest? Cause pain in your lower back?
Taste
Food and drink are often ways that we are comforted anyway but they show up a lot in grief because people tend to bring things to eat as a way of support. You may turn to food or you may be repulsed by it.
But if grief was…
- A food, what would you think of? Would it be bitter? Sweet? Bittersweet? Sour? Salty? Gooey? Green? Would it be spinach? (I say spinach because it seems like a lot of people don’t like it. I actually do, though. If you do too, then you probably won’t want to choose spinach to represent grief.)
- A drink? Would it be thick or would it be thin and watery? Blue? Would it be wine or something else with alcohol?
Smell
To think of grief as a smell might sound really, really odd. But seriously, if grief was…
- A specific smell, what would you describe it as? Would it be acrid? Would it be something burning?
- A food again? Would the smell of a certain food accurately describe grief to you?
- A perfume? Not all perfumes are pleasant to everyone. For example, if you find strong, flowery scents overwhelming and depressing, you might think of one with those characteristics as a representation of grief. Or maybe the perfume or cologne that your loved one wore, while it may be pleasant, may now represent a feeling of grief. This reminds me of how my late husband loved this particular candle called “Garden Rain”. While a beautiful, lovely scent, that smell would represent grief to me.
Find Your Own
If you enjoyed this little exercise, or at least found it mildly interesting, you could go beyond the five senses and come up with your own representations of grief. What if grief were a number? What if grief was a day of the week? A month?
You might find that if you do any of these personal descriptions of grief, that what you’d pick one day might change several months down the road. It can be interesting to see how grief changes for you as time goes on. Because it usually does for everyone, in some ways, whether they are big or small or both. And it can be a way of telling or showing others, who might not understand what you’re going through, what this process is sometimes like for you. Sometimes, when you say something like, grief for me feels like a frozen green pond or a black cave in a snowstorm, it can give a person an instant sense of that emotion and therefore, invite more understanding.
Would you like to share with me and any other visitor here some of your grief descriptions and representations? Please post in the comments below!