A Week of Little Thoughts About Life
I’ve worked with people who are grieving husbands, wives, adult children, miscarriages, stillborns, brothers, mothers, fathers, sisters, abortions, friends, and dogs.
When you read that sentence, you may have found yourself judging something about one of the losses I listed. You may have found yourself thinking, well, a dog isn’t the same as a father. Or, if she didn’t want to grieve an abortion, she shouldn’t have had one.
Or, you may have been on the receiving end of a judgement or assumption about your own grief, “Your mother died over a year ago…you should be moving on by now.” Or, “You never really knew your baby, that’s not the same as someone who has had a child for years and gotten to know them.” Or even, “You must miss your mom so much,” even though you and your mom were not close for years.
The problem with judging grief is that we never know the whole story. The grief someone experiences is in the context of their whole life –
· All the other relationships they have,
· Losses and trauma that have come before,
· Who and how they experience trust,
· What was the nature of that particular relationship,
· What were the griever’s hopes and expectations in life, and
· What is the general personality and coping of the griever
Some of the toughest grief I’ve ever witnessed is the loss of a spouse — especially when that marriage happened when people were young. I’ve worked with a number of wives, who married a high school sweetheart at around the time they were 18 or 20 years old. They moved from their parents’ home in with their husband. The marriages worked in part because the ‘kids’ who got married, grew up together. They formed everything about one another. I’ve found the wives to be strong and interesting women, who loved strong and interesting men. Their identities were individual, yet also bound together. When the husband dies after 30, 40 or more years, the wife is left to rebuild from the very core of her being.
Before I worked in grief, I would have had a bias — something like, “Listen — you get married. Someone’s got to die first and it’s usually the man. On some level, a person has to be prepared for this, right?” Do you read my judgement in that? One gift of working in the field of death, dying and grief is that my pre-conceived notions are challenged.
And I’ve found that I have to let them go.
A man I know lost his dad to suicide. The ‘story’ so often reflected from friends and extended family is that his dad ‘finally lost his battle with depression.’ This is an assumption about his dad and his grief, that he finds enraging. His dad did not suffer from lifelong depression and the circumstances that came together that opened the door to suicide remain mysterious and distressing.
If you are experiencing judgement around your grief you may also be experiencing rage, isolation, irritability, despair or confusion. You may be wondering, “Am I supposed to be feeling different than I am?”
You are the expert on your own grief and you are the expert on the person you love who died and the nature of that relationship.
The most grieved I’ve ever felt was when my marriage ended. Many people know about the end of my marriage and loved and supported me through that. My own aunt, whose husband (my uncle), died unexpectedly at the age of 65 said, “What you are going through is worse than what I went through. You don’t really get closure.” That felt incredibly supportive, but it also points to our human want to measure the weight of grief. This or that grief is worse or easier than another grief. Or we make assumptions that we know or can guess what that grief feels like for that person.
Human connection and support is essential — really the foundation of moving through the pain of grief. If you are grieving, life is asking something heroic of you — you must seek and accept what love and care others have to offer you, at the same time you accept that there is a part of grief you will walk alone. We are understood, but we may not be fully understood. Our loss is shared with those who love us, but it is exquisitely individual as well.
Be gentle with grievers. Be gentle with yourself.
Below is a pretty comprehensive list of grief resources. I would also add Compassionate Friends for child loss.
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