There has to be a better word for it than “process”.
When we learn of the deaths of people we care about—or the deaths of people who people we care about care about… when we discover, as another dear friend did, that someone we love lost limbs in Afghanistan, it can take a while to sift and sort and make peace with everything the experience brings up.
My friend confessed: “I’m still processing it.” And I said, “There has to be a better word for it than process. It sounds so mechanical.” I knew she would hear my words as honoring what she’s going through rather than criticizing her word choice.
There does need to be a better word for how we move through the experience of deep loss. “Grieving” isn’t big enough—there is more to moving through loss than grief. “Processing” captures some of what happens, but isn’t human enough.
The perfect word may be out there. Or there may not be a perfect word. As a culture, we’re moving from being mechanistic to being more organic. Perhaps the language hasn’t caught up yet.
If you have a better word, I’d love to hear what it is. For lack of a better word, many of us are “processing” quite a bit these days.
Today is Mother’s Day, my friend Barbara’s birthday, and the 26th anniversary of my first husband’s passing. If you know my history, you know that Mike’s death was a catalyst for my finding my voice and for my SpeakStrong message. Death will do that. It’s the ultimate crap detector. It became glaringly obvious how much of that I had. 
A young lady was struggling to fit her bag into the overhead bin. The flight attendant commented,
I dreamed the other night that I was supporting an Executive Admin at a conference and helping her get the most out of the multi-faceted event. At one point I addressed a large group that was studying to pose the question,
Compassion is the ability to feel someone else’s pain as if it were your own. When you feel compassion, you care deeply.
Are you familiar with muscle-checking? It works much like a lie-detector test, which detects whether a statement triggers a stress response. While not always accurate, the common experience is that a lie creates measurable stress, while telling the truth, even an unpleasant truth, creates a calmer parasympathetic response. 
We all know what “good grief” means, right? It’s an ironic expression that says things aren’t right. There’s nothing “good” about it. But unless you grieve, you can’t really love or embrace life. 
I enjoy the show “Mad Men” for many reasons, one of which is the surprises. When the emotionally silent power broker Don Draper married his secretary Megan, I assumed it wouldn’t be long before he shut her down and she became disillusioned, codependent, sarcastic and resentful. But instead of hiding behind a veneer of polite non-communication, when they bump up against each other, they let things fly, act out and dramatize. It’s not polite, it’s passionate.
Decisions, decisions. Some of us are decision challenged. Why? I better understood my own hesitancy to make decisions when I discovered the word root yesterday.