Nobody Gets Through Life Unscathed

We’ve been watching a series called Shrinking recently, with Harrison Ford and Jason Segel. It gets the balance between grief and humour, and feels like it could possibly be your own life. But this isn’t a review of the show, just watch it, it’s like Ted Lasso.

A line from Harrison Ford stuck out in the show as we watched. He’s talking to Segel’s teenage daughter about the death of her mother.  

“Nobody gets through this life unscathed. Not you. Not me. But then you’re left with a choice. Are you going to let your grief drown you or are you going to face it and come out the other side?”

He is by no means ignoring grief. At another point in the show, he said: “Pick a piece of music. Something sad as hell. Just feel your feelings. Takes about 15 minutes.”

The grief is there, but how do we both live with it and move on from it?

I’m not making this show out to be certified therapy. But I think there is surely something to be said for feeling deeply the pang of grief, choosing to face it, and then coming out the other side.

It’s brave. And genuine.

A child whose parent isn’t a parent, but a child.

A dream of pregnancy, turning into a nightmare of infertility.

A friendship tarnished by mistrust.

A lover, who no longer loves and you no longer love.

A body, that has failed to give you the life you would have wanted.

Death. Estrangement. Sickness. Broken relationships. Financial worries. Mistakes you can’t undo. Relationships that are just really hard.

There is grief in all of it.

 And when that grief comes to me (to be honest, I don’t have much to grieve about, but it does come, especially with relationship tension or loss), I often get really bitter. Resentful. Compare my own situation to that of other people who don’t have a clue what it feels like. And end up in a perpetual state of complaint, sadness.

I don’t like feeling like that. So then I just ignore it, push it down, that pulsating, low-grade frustration that certain aspects of life aren’t how I’d like them to be. Without fail, it pops up again, in all its fury, because I never took time to work through the grief.

All that being said, I wonder if Harrison’s (we’re on a first name basis) advice is worth putting into practice. Giving myself set time to grieve over what I feel is lost, and then turning off the sad music, and getting up to move forward with how life is, not how I wished it would be.

What do you think? Any other thoughts on how to get through grief, no matter how seemingly trivial or hugely overwhelming?