Grieving is a constantly evolving process. It’s never quite over, though you do gradually feel differently as time progresses. If you’re searching for ways to healthily grieve a loss and breathe life into the memory of your loved one, consider these helpful ways to remember a lost loved one.
Give a Gift in Memoriam
As your loved one is so intangibly gone, it’s nice to give those who share your pain a concrete gift to honor a lost one’s memory. Of all the occasions to personalize a gift, giving to the bereaved is one of the most appropriate.
Deciding on the gift is perhaps the most useful time for processing your loss because, in personalizing your gift, you can reflect on one particular facet of your loved one’s life. This reflection renews your appreciation of their love in an intensely creative way. And in the end, you can give the product of your reflection to other grievers—siblings, parents, friends, or other loved ones—who will treasure the solid memory.
Pursue a Cause They Cared For
Another way to remember a lost loved one is by advocating for causes the deceased cared greatly about. Pursue racial justice, strive for environmental sustainability, or get involved serving for your local domestic violence shelter. Use your loved one’s values to motivate your own do-gooding; in doing so, you can help them live a little bit even after they pass. Then, as you help your community, you can also feel as close to them as possible.
Tell Their Stories When They’re Gone
Also, take up the mantel of storytelling when your parent, spouse, friend, or loved one passes away. You are, after all, able to retain parts of their life through the memories you keep of them. So, tell the stories they always returned to. Repeating those narratives helps you and others relish the past when they were still here to prank people, help others out, laugh, and live an honest life.
Beyond the stories they’d tell, you can also talk through what you remember about them as an individual. You shouldn’t feel like you need to avoid bad stories and only tell the good. Rather, tell their stories to honestly get at their complexity as a person. When you do that, you can properly empathize with their choices—even the bad ones—and remember them as a real but not perfect person, just like us all.
Hopefully, doing some or all of these things helps you process your loss, bond with other people who feel your pain, and move forward to pursue what your loved one cared about.
