Focus on small steps to take each moment. Instead of focusing on the stretch of days ahead of you with this loss feeling like a looming storm cloud over your future, focus on the one step you can take today to get through the day. When experiencing feelings of depression, putting one foot in front of the other can make a huge difference.
On the difficult days that come up, name the emotion you’re experiencing and remind yourself that this is simply a manifestation of the love you have that can’t be shared physically or verbally with the person you have lost. Use duʿāʾ to channel that love forward.
Instead of pushing the pain away, try to bring awareness to the feeling and see if you can stay present with whatever you notice. In her book When Things Fall Apart: Heart Advice for Difficult Times, Buddhist teacher and author Pema Chödrön writes, “To stay with the shakiness—to stay with a broken heart, with a rumbling stomach, with the feeling of hopelessness and wanting to get revenge—that is the path of true awakening. Sticking with that uncertainty, getting the knack of relaxing in the midst of chaos, learning not to panic—this is the spiritual path. Getting the knack of catching ourselves, of gently and compassionately catching ourselves, is the path of the warrior.”
We can find great healing, comfort, and peace in Jesus, our Savior. Jesus knows our pain because He felt it first. He can heal us. One of the Savior’s roles is “to bind up the brokenhearted, to proclaim liberty to the captives, and the opening of the prison to them that are bound” (Isaiah 61:1). Pray to feel His peace and healing power in your life.
When I work with clients, I tell them that grief is like losing a limb. Sure, you can live without an arm or leg and the rest of your body will still function but that will never negate the fact that you miss the absent limb. It was there, functioning as a part of you and now it’s gone. In its absence, you have to learn to live without it and that takes time. So does grief.
Don’t let anyone tell you how to feel, and don’t tell yourself how to feel either. Your grief is your own, and no one else can tell you when it’s time to “move on” or “get over it.” Let yourself feel whatever you feel without embarrassment or judgment. It’s okay to be angry, to yell at the heavens, to cry or not to cry. It’s also okay to laugh, to find moments of joy, and to let go when you’re ready.
Talk to a therapist or grief counsellor. If your grief feels like too much to bear, find a mental health professional with experience in grief counselling. An experienced therapist can help you work through intense emotions and overcome obstacles to your grieving.
Make duʿāʾ for the reunion you dream of and find comfort in the promise of Allah, “We unite the believers with their offspring who followed them in faith…”24Also remember the statement of the Prophet ﷺ: “There is no Muslim who is stricken with a calamity and reacts by saying as Allah has commanded: ‘Innā lillāhi, wa innā ilayhi rājiʿūn. Allāhumma ʿindaka iḥtasabtu muṣībatī, faʾjurni fīha, wa ‘iḍnī minhā (Truly, to Allah we belong and truly, to Him we shall return. O Allah, with You I seek reward for my calamity, so reward me for it and compensate me),’ but Allah will reward him for that and compensate him with something better than it.”25 Although nothing can replace the loss of someone you love, living an eternal life of happiness and peace with them in jannah is the best compensation we can pray for.
Rein in Regrets: Hindsight is always 20/20. We can look back at every circumstance in our lives and consider multiple alternatives in the hopes that things would have been different but, in actuality, the only reality is the present moment we are faced with. This moment will only be more difficult if we choose to focus on “what ifs.” Instead, consider what ʿUbādah ibn al-Ṣāmit said to his son: “Son! You will not get the taste of the reality of faith until you know that what has come to you could not miss you and that what has missed you could not come to you. I heard the Messenger of Allah ﷺ say: The first thing Allah created was the pen. He said to it: Write. It asked: What should I write, my Lord? He said: Write what was decreed about everything till the Last Hour comes…” Changing the past is not feasible so channeling our energy into something unchangeable is a recipe for intense pain.
The role of religion in coping with suffering and loss.
Religion and spirituality are complex but important topics in the wake of a loss. Religion can be an incredible comfort in times of loss. But losses can also cause us to question our faith, as we struggle to make sense of the death. And, in cases like the quote above, grief can confuse our feelings about our faith… and our faith can confuse feelings about our grief.
Grief is one of the most raw and vulnerable emotional states a person can experience. Although loss is a normal part of life, grief and loss during a pandemic pose unique challenges due to uncertainty and social distancing. While some of us are mourning a loved one’s passing, some of us may be grieving the loss of economic security or a way of life. Grief looks different from person to person, and can also vary greatly from adult to child. Normalizing grief and understanding how it works can help lessen the pain, and assist us in better navigating anxiety and sadness during this unprecedented time. It’s also important to know that while grief can pose challenges to our faith, it doesn’t contradict our faith. We know from the Prophets that grief is a natural and acceptable way to cope when we are faced with loss, and that grief can even bring us closer to Allah. By using the individual, family, and community psychospiritual coping skills outlined in this guide we pray the ummah can find some solace during this pandemic and move towards collectively healing inshaAllah.
In Islam, the faithful must endure suffering with hope and faith, not resist or ask why, accept it as Allah’s will and submit to it as a test of faith. Allah never asks more than can be endured. One must also work to alleviate the suffering of others, as well as one’s own. Suffering is also seen as a blessing. Through that gift, the sufferer remembers God and connects with him. Suffering expunges the sins of human beings and cleanses their soul for the immense reward of the afterlife, and the avoidance of hell.
Religions have always had a central role with respect to death because they offer perspectives that enable humans to make sense of dying, thus opening a window to the meaning of a painful experience. Elia recounts being received at the Vatican after writing a letter to the pope, using a religious metaphor:
The document aims to reconcile suffering and pain with the belief in a loving God. Those who suffer here on Earth are united in that suffering with Christ, who died on the cross. Suffering is a trial, but it is through that trial that faith, hope and love continue. And through that suffering, an individual can find their own identity and their identity in Christ.
It is not that your grief and your faith should be separate. It’s that you must remember that the depth of your grief does not imply a loss of faith. The problem with the statement “Those who believe need not grieve” is that one is made to feel that the reverse must be true: Those who do grieve do not believe. What we are here to say, for all of you who have felt that their faith should be enough to eliminate their grief is this:
Suffering plays an important role in a number of religions, regarding matters such as the following: consolation or relief; moral conduct (do no harm, help the afflicted, show compassion); spiritual advancement through life hardships or through self-imposed trials (mortification of the flesh, penance, asceticism); ultimate destiny (salvation, damnation, hell). Theodicy deals with the problem of evil, which is the difficulty of reconciling the existence of an omnipotent and benevolent god with the existence of evil: a quintessential form of evil, for many people, is extreme suffering, especially in innocent children, or in creatures destined to an eternity of torments (see problem of hell).
We just have recently lost my grandma who has lived with us and faith is very important to us (or at least to me) to deal with her very sudden and unexpected dead. I don’t think “those who believe don’t need to grief”, we are all grieving in different ways, but faith in something may help. I was brought up in the believe that there is a life after death and that death is the beginning of a new life, which does not make missing a person any less sad, but it helps (me) to deal better with the pain that she won’t come back home. There will always moments missing somebody, missing coming home and nobody opens the door, nobody receiving your packages, nobody putting your clothes inside, when it starts to rain, but as we’ve talked to our priest, it’s about embracing these moments and turning them into something positive and knowing they are in a better place now, which helps a lot to accept the loss. It also helps a lot that we know she was not afraid of death and believed in being reunited with her family in heaven. Maybe like in Johnny Cash’s “will the circle be unbroken” or “we’ll meet again”.
When patients suffer, they experience a sense of their own vulnerability and finitude, as well as a disruption and fracture of their own person and sense of community. As a result, the experience of suffering can be an opportunity to experience his own spirituality. When well-constructed, the belief structure is a source of comfort, welfare, security, meaning, idealism and force. Many patients use their beliefs when coping with its illnesses, and the cure can be influenced by the positivist reinforcement of the patient.
Pain is an unpleasant feeling and emotional experience perceived by people as a consequence of physical health problems such as injuries and diseases or as an implication of mental conditions caused by emotional factors (4). To cope with pain and complications, people usually try to understand, explain and interpret it, attempt to overcome the complication and interpret it (5). In hard times, religion plays a role as a potential source of comfort and conformity (6).
The role of spirituality in coping with suffering and loss.
Sometimes that means looking at your faith in a deeper way. Most religions have long encountered death and loss, and speak to human tragedy in complex ways. Spirituality can bring both comforts and challenges in trying to simplify those beliefs to bring meaning to loss.
Spirituality helps people to overcome the issues that they face and offers an optimistic and a hopeful outlook through creating a sense of purpose and meaning and integrating people’s mental states (7). Pargament defined religion as a kind of religious coping. Religious coping is an internal source, which helps people to search for a meaning at the time of injury and creates intimacy with God, helps people to perceive the meaning of life, and leads to mental comfort (8). Spirituality increases patients’ awareness, helps them to pay more attention to unknown aspects of life and to refine their thoughts, and helps patients to focus on the problem and on the method of dealing with it (9). Krause, in a study, indicated that suffering makes people aware of the existence of God and this is why people apply religion/ spirituality as a way to deal with their pain and complications (10).
The inability to say a final goodbye, to see the body of the deceased with their own eyes, and to celebrate the body severely affected their ability to peacefully deal with the loss. However, spirituality and religiosity proved to be protective factors in the face of such a profound crisis, providing support for most of the mourners. On the other hand, those who had to cope while feeling psychologically abandoned by the God in whom they believed had more difficulty with anger management. Our results, therefore, confirm the importance of these dimensions and how important it is that they mature over the course of people’s lives in such a way that they can support people in times of difficulty.
It is important to have meaning or purpose in life. This sense of meaning is diminished by an illness. This loss and its associated rediscovery were central aspects of both depression and spirituality. Spirituality may provide such a sense of meaning through its emphasis on liturgy, worship and prayer found in the major religious traditions. Adverse life events may be appraised in a different way. Religion provides a meaning context in which adversity can be understood.
You may find comfort in the rituals that your faith community provides, including rituals offered during illness and after the death. Or you may feel the need to look deeper inside yourself, examining and perhaps even modifying your beliefs as you adjust to life without the person you loved. This may be true especially when the loss was sudden, traumatic, or intentional. As you struggle with questions of spirituality after a loss, the resources of your faith can be excellent guides. Every form of spirituality, each faith, has books and teachers to turn to as you try to make sense of the loss. There also may be rituals that offer comfort and assist your search for meaning. And for many, the support of a faith community can be essential.
This chapter is intended to present evidences and discuss proposals on how health care services can empower spiritual-religious resources of patients in order to they can be used as an efficient coping strategy. It is known that a relation between better health and religion or spirituality is found in studies covering several physical and mental conditions. Spiritual-religious coping is the use of religious beliefs, attitudes or practices to reduce the emotional distress caused by stressful events of life, such as loss or change, which gives suffering meaning and makes it more bearable. Spiritual distress is a state of suffering due to spiritual causes. Generally it may be associated with unfulfilled spiritual needs. The consequent defensive behaviors patient can develop under spiritual distress may affect clinical treatment and quality of life. Health care services must invest on some actions, in order to minimize conflicts between religious interests of patients and medical treatment. We discussed a list of actions to promote the positive impact of spirituality and religiosity on the health treatment process, which would be followed by health care professionals and services. The elements that are at stake are the institutions (health care and rehabilitation), the people associated with the process (physicians, nurses, other professionals) and individual values of patient (religious and spiritual).
Spiritual-Religious (S-R) coping is the use of religious beliefs, attitudes or practices to reduce the emotional distress caused by stressful events of life, such as loss or change, which gives suffering meaning and makes it more bearable. Religious beliefs and practices are used to regulate emotion during times of illness, change, and circumstances that are out of patients’ personal control .
Spirituality has an impact on patients’ ability to cope with illness. For many individuals, spiritual beliefs and practices provide a source of comfort, supply a font of wisdom to help make sense of what seems otherwise senseless, and prescribe a ritual pathway for addressing the basic spiritual questions of meaning, value, and relationship . Aspects of religious coping include :
The experience of loss after the death of a significant person causes bereavement, which is a psychological state of all-encompassing grief. The depth of suffering is important and often causes significant negative consequences in the daily life of the grieving person (Attig, 1996; Testoni, 2015. This suffering requires the activation of weighty grief work to gain a new existential normal beyond negativity, anxiety, and distress (Cohen & Johnson, 2017; Gonçalves et al., 2015; Hai et al., 2019; Newman & Graham, 2018; Wass, 2004). One of the factors that allows the grief to be better processed is the spiritual dimension (Diener et al., 2011; González-Sanguino et al., 2020; Suryani et al., 2011). Many studies confirm that those who grieve through the spiritual dimension suffer less from loneliness and are more resilient (Angell et al., 1998; Cadell et al., 2012; Damianakis & Marziali, 2012; Walsh, 2007, 2020). Despite the pain that grief entails, particularly traumatic grief, it is possible to transform loss into an opportunity for growth (“post-traumatic growth”; Bonanno et al., 2004; Tedeschi & Calhoun, 2004, 2008) since some people manage to transform trauma and difficulties into opportunities for change and personal development (Páez et al., 2012; Seybold, 2007; Walsh, 2020). One of the factors enabling this transformation is spirituality, which facilitates post-traumatic growth processes (Koening, 2020; Prieto-Ursua & Jodar, 2020).
The pain of grief is real—but so is the peace that comes from God. If you are coping with the loss of a loved one, surround yourself with every resource for support and peace. Through prayer, scripture study, and the support of loved ones, you can find real hope and comfort.