Grief Soup for Multiple Losses
Have you ever eaten homemade vegetable soup? It’s nourishing, warm, and comforting. You may have memories of your mom making it for you when you weren’t feeling well or feeling sad. There’s just something about the taste and texture that soothes and calms the spirit.
Several ingredients blend to make the vegetable soup tasty and delicious. Although recipes vary, it traditionally includes onions, carrots, celery, garlic, diced tomatoes, potatoes, green beans, and seasonings like thyme and bay leaves. Each component adds its own distinct flavor, which blends with the others to create a deliciously unique taste.
When eating vegetable soup, we savor the combined flavors of the vegetables and seasonings. We don’t retrieve and eat the onions, then the carrots, then the green beans. Our spoon gathers the blended ingredients that make up the soup.
When we experience the deaths of several loved ones in a short period of time, we often don’t know which one to grieve. We feel guilty when we think about one because we feel we are omitting and neglecting the others. We love each one of them and want to grieve each one to the depth we feel they deserve.
Grieving several loved ones simultaneously is like eating homemade vegetable soup. Just like the ingredients in soup, each person added a distinct flavor and warmth to our lives. Now they’ve all blended into one big pot of grief soup, and we can’t seem to separate their unique flavor from the others.
As you grieve several loved ones, you naturally dip your spoon into your grief soup and pull out many flavors at once. You don’t think about the separate ingredients. You savor the flavors of all the parts that come together to give your soup its distinct character. Without even realizing it, you are grieving each one who died. They are all an important part of the recipe. None of them is excluded.
Grief soup reminds us that we grieve the death of each person we love. Even when it’s impossible to isolate our grief for them from the others we’ve lost, we’re still grieving them.
In this season of multiple losses, rest in your grief and know you are giving each of your loved ones the attention they deserve. And remember, you have a pot of grief soup because of the endless love you share with each one. What a gift!