Good Grief!

Have you ever said this? Of course your have! I said it a lot today, in lieu of the many expletives that were available to me. The full moon was in full effect—things were feeling a bit off, an inordinate amount of craziness on the roads, changes, delays—little bumps in the road. Good grief people! I find it interesting how we parrot things without question, little sayings, idioms and euphemisms. We know what they mean, or what we think they mean and we even know when and how to use them. Having just come out of a long period of grief, I was struck by the oxymoron nature of this particular two-word euphemism—good grief, and because I didn't have anything better to do, I looked it up. (Enter sarcasm here.)

The term is considered a minced oath, which is a subgroup of euphemisms, an alternative to swearing—a more polite way to say something like "Good God!" Which is precisely what, according to research, the English were doing. Expressing things with restraint and politeness, because that's what they do. By the way, those are not my words.

While the double-entendre has nothing historically to do with the state of grief from loss, it caused me to pause and consider—is grief good?

Nothing good or bad about it—it just is. A very human state-of-emotions process. And because we are humans, we also gave that process stages and names—five of them. Denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. Are there five stages? I don't know. All I know from my own experience is that no matter how enlightened, unattached and spiritual I think I am, with the death and loss of a few good friends, grief got the better part of me. Looking at the list, I'm pretty sure I wove in and out of some or all of them, in no semblance of order. And when one round of grief seemed to have passed another loss occurred, stirring it up all over again—maybe this time starting in the middle of that list. And then another loss hit, and it felt as if all the stages were happening at once. I may have come to the point of acceptance, but you never know what will trigger a revisit to one or more on that list. The grieving experience is one that is highly personal, there are no timelines or concrete ways in which to navigate the feelings, except to accept them and simply have them. Good grief—it's natural, we're only human.