Good Grief!

Welcome to the beginning of autumn!

Are we ready for leaves changing color and the sun dipping down earlier? Summer is coming to an end. Change is here, and I can almost hear myself citing Charlie Brown: “Good grief! When did that happen?”

Although I am a huge Peanuts fan (and I’ll usually take Snoopy for the win), it’s Charlie Brown who’s showing up in my mind today. I suppose that’s because we all have a little “Charlie” in our personalities. Like Charlie, we may tend to live in the perpetual gap between what we expect to happen and how reality actually unfolds.

He expects to kick the football. Lucy pulls it away. He expects the baseball game might finally go differently. Usually, it doesn’t. He hopes the little red-haired girl will notice him. She doesn’t. He tries to get the Christmas tree right and somehow chooses the saddest tree imaginable.

And yet Charlie Brown keeps showing up.

Isn’t this a story we all know at some level?

August is Grief Awareness Month. While we usually think of grief in the tragic form of losing a loved one, for me, grief also shows up in the more subtle changes of life.

A week ago, I was driving past my kids’ elementary school and saw a bunch of little ones piling off the bus, their enormous backpacks bouncing, lunch bags in hand (except that one kid who left his on the seat of the family wagon), then lining up and readying to be marched into their new classrooms.

For a moment, I saw my own kids there in line. But as I blinked, they were gone. Grown up. No longer waving to me in the driver’s seat as they shyly traipsed off with their new teachers.

Nothing tragic happened in that moment. In fact, something wonderful happened: my children grew up.

And still, there is loss.

You can be grateful for what is and tender about what is no longer.

This is where I think Charlie Brown’s story isn’t funny because sadness or disappointment doesn’t hurt. He’s funny because disappointment does hurt, and somehow life continues anyway. There is something wonderfully human about watching him stare at another failed attempt and essentially say, “Good grief.”

From this perspective, I think grief is partly the experience of our internal roadmap no longer matching reality. Something was here. Someone was there. I was this age. My children were little. I imagined life going one way. Then reality changed, but some part of the brain is still reaching for what used to be there.

What do we do when the future we were waiting for doesn’t arrive?

We grieve not only what we had and lost. Sometimes we grieve what we thought would happen and didn’t.

That includes the marriage that wasn’t what we imagined, the career that didn’t unfold as planned, the parent who couldn’t become the parent we needed, the diagnosis that changed the future, the child who grew up much faster than expected, or simply the realization that time moved while we were busy living.

Not all grief is equal in its weight or consequence, of course. Some losses knock the wind out of us. Others simply tap us on the shoulder. But perhaps they share something important: the awareness that life has changed in a real and altering way.

The brain is an expectation-making machine. It learns patterns of people, places, routines, relationships, and futures. When reality changes, those learned expectations don’t disappear immediately. In fact, they linger, like laundry left on the line, waving at us from a distance. There is a longing for what was.

And that is exactly what happened to me while driving past the elementary school. I knew my children weren’t there. But for an instant, my mind populated that scene with the little people who once belonged there.

We like our roadmaps and destination points. We like knowing where we are going. We don’t particularly like the unexpected detours or the unnamed feelings that come when life suddenly sends us somewhere else.

So, maybe we name them.

Good grief!

Grief sucks!

Go hug a cactus, Grief!

Name it. Pin it down. Give it some room to be known. Because once we can recognize what we’re feeling, grief becomes a little less elusive. It becomes information. A signal that something has changed and we may need to find our bearings again.

Maybe this is where grief gets a new job.

To me, grief, if we give it permission, is less of a destination and more like an unexpected co-pilot. It shows up when the flight plan has changed. It notices the turbulence, the hairpin turns, and the places where the landmarks below no longer look familiar.

Grief gives us signals: Something changed here. This mattered to me. I don’t quite know where I am yet.

We don’t necessarily have to silence the co-pilot. We can listen to the information without handing over the controls.

And maybe that’s what Charlie Brown does surprisingly well. He knows Lucy might pull the football away. Experience has given him plenty of evidence. Life has not exactly rewarded his optimism. But there he is again, backing up, taking a running start, and preparing to kick.

Maybe the task isn’t to stop looking backward, either. Perhaps it’s learning how to look backward without requiring the past to return. We can miss the little hands, the old house, the person we once were, or the future we thought was coming. We can acknowledge that this mattered, that it still matters, and then slowly begin adding some new roads to the map.

Because resilience isn’t always triumphant. Sometimes it looks more like standing there with your hair slightly disheveled, staring at the football you didn’t get to kick and muttering:

“Good grief.”

And then showing up to play ball anyway.