Several years ago there was a survey that asked how long a person should mourn the death of a loved one. The answers varied from forty-eight hours to six months—which just goes to show you that, as a society, we don’t understand the grief process very well. Clinical tests reveal that it actually takes closer to two years, and even that is somewhat misleading, since all of us grieve differently.

The main problem with misunderstanding the grief process is that too often we try to rush people through it. We say things like, “You need to get your act together and stop moping around,” or “It’s high time that you got back out there and started living your life again.”

Although well intended, such comments probably do more harm than good. If you had broken your leg, no one would criticize you for using crutches until it fully healed. If you had just undergone major surgery, no one would be pressuring you to run a marathon the following month.

The loss of a loved one is no different. It is a major wound in your life. Moreover, no one—including yourself—knows exactly how long it will take for this wound to heal, because each of us heals in our own way and according to our own timetable.

Getting through the grief process in a relatively short amount of time does not indicate that you are morally superior, nor should it ever be used as a measuring stick for how much you loved someone. I actually heard someone once suggest that “So-and-so must not have really loved his wife, because just look at how quickly he got over her death.” A statement like that is not only wrong, it is downright hurtful!

In my experience there are at least two ways in which we sometimes rush people through the grief process (and mind you, we may not even realize that we are doing it). The first is by saying too much. It is as though we think that, when a tragedy occurs, we somehow need to defend God and explain why this had to happen. But the fact of the matter is that even our best theological arguments don’t offer any real understanding, much less true comfort.

None of us fully comprehends the mind of God, and suggesting to grieving people that there is a perfectly rational explanation for all of this, if they would just learn to accept it, sends the subtle message that they are not moving through the process fast enough.

The second way we tend to rush people is just the opposite—namely, we say too little. We avoid the subject altogether, under the mistaken belief that by not mentioning the hurt, it will heal more quickly. However, this also sends the subtle message that, since the rest of us have moved on, the grieving person should too.

The bottom line is that grieving is as natural as eating when you are hungry, sleeping when you are tired, or sneezing when your nose itches. It is nature’s way of healing a broken heart. Thus, we should never view grief as an enemy that needs to be overcome or subdued.

We ought to give people permission to grieve in their own way and at their own pace. We can walk with them through that process, to be sure … but hurrying them along is not helping them, and more importantly, it’s not healing them either!