Good Grief
This post is fairly personal as it’s about grief. And the only grief I can really speak to is my own, and the grief I’ve seen in those around me. But I think there’s something generalizable in what I’ve experienced and worth sharing even with those who don’t know me well.
The last few years I’ve had to deal with more grief than the rest of my life combined. Perhaps this just shows that I’m lucky, that I didn’t have much of it up till now. But it also means that I had a lot to learn about how to process it (and help my kids process theirs).
During that time, I noticed three things that we tended to do that, I think, makes the sadness harder to handle and, ultimately, to move past. The first was a hard one for me to learn, the second would have tripped me up if I hadn’t actively worked to avoid it, and the third took its toll on my oldest child.
Noticing We Are Grieving
It wasn’t until well over a year into my divorce that I finally realized how sad I was about it and accepted that I needed to grieve over it before I could move on. Before that, I was reeling from the changes in my life, I was angry at the person who was now my adversary, I was free from how I had felt for years, I was relishing the extra time with my kids, I was worried about the future. I was many things, but I didn’t really realize the deep sadness that ran through all of it. Sure, I could tell I was sad some of the time, that I felt depressed and overwhelmed by it sometimes, but I couldn’t locate the real source of the sorrow. Much less admit it to myself, or to others.
You see, I thought that because I knew it was the right decision for us both, that things hadn’t been working for far too long, and that things had quickly turned unpleasant, because of all that, I thought that there was nothing really to grieve about. I also told myself some myths about myself that made it harder for me to see and accept what was going on. But eventually I had to face up to the fact – admit to myself – that, regardless of what I thought about it, I still felt a huge loss. A loss of what could have been, of the life I thought I would have, of the person I had married. A lot of that had been gone for a while, but it had been lost slowly, sometimes so slowly that I didn’t notice it while it was happening.
I eventually realized that I was holding on to a lot of things because I hadn’t dealt with the sorrow. I had lost something and was grieving it, but until I noticed that fact I wasn’t able to process the way I felt and come to terms with the new reality.
Pushing Away Sadness
Throughout this time, when I felt down, I learned how tempting it can be to push it away. Even before I noticed that I was grieving, when I would feel sad, or depressed, or overwhelmed, I would initially try to shake it off. It is tempting to not want to feel the hurt and to push it away, to distract yourself, throw yourself into work or projects, to act happy even though you’re not.
But what I realized was, when I could identify that I was sad about something, I was much better off letting myself feel it than stuffing it down or pretending it didn’t exist. So during some of the toughest moments, I decided that I would actually schedule time to be sad. I would set aside an hour, or even a couple, and lie in bed and let the pain wash over me. I wouldn’t run away from it. I would get to know the sadness and make sure I actually let myself feel it. I would cry, I would feel sorry for myself, I would wallow – whatever I needed – and let whatever came up come up. I didn’t enjoy these times, but I tried to appreciate them in a way, to see that all the ways I suffered made me human.
And I found that this would eventually just let it flow out of me. It stopped hanging around trying to get my attention, trying to make sure I knew it was there. It seemed that by acknowledging it, by really feeling it, this part of me knew that I had gotten its message: “something is wrong, something’s been lost, and you are hurting”.
Thankfully, I haven’t needed one of these in a while, but I know there will likely be a next time and I will need it then.
The Right Way to Grieve
Finally, I saw my son fall into a different trap when all my kids had to deal first with the sudden loss of a family pet, and then the sudden loss of a grandparent. He got caught up on expectations: how he thought he was supposed to feel and when, how he thought others were supposed to act, what he thought others expected from him.
He compounded his grief with all manner of other emotions bubbling up from these expectations.
He felt guilty for not feeling the loss right away, seeing his siblings’ expressions of grief and worrying that he was broken because he didn’t feel it. He felt angry at his siblings, when it finally did hit him, that they were already over it, expecting them to still be affected like he was. He worried that people expected him to perform grief in certain way, to cry with them or talk about it, when he just wanted to be alone.
He thought there was a right way to grieve, a formula for how to feel and act, that proved that you were really sad. When his own trajectory didn’t match his own expectations, or those he thought his family held, he got tangled in a new web of emotions and struggled to deal with the real hurt.
So my take away, I think, is that to truly process grief, we need to notice we are grieving and we need to avoid pushing it away, but we also need to realize that there is no right way to do that, that each person, each tragedy, each sorrow, is unique and the course the grief will run will vary in ways that will speak nothing about the amount of hurt or the depth of loss. And if we remember that, maybe we can get the message sooner, hear it more clearly, appreciate it and be able to heal and move on sooner.