A Grief Starter Kit

Our society does great at showcasing (and attaching positive/negative value to) two types of grief- Quiet grief and loud grief.  Quiet grief is considered a more "honorable" grief.  Think streets lined with mourners paying homage. Holding a hand and waiting.  This is an expected sorrow and reckoning with death, a passive understanding of our mortality.  Conversely, loud grief is deemed "angry" grief.  Planes crashing into the twin towers.  Utter chaos and disruption.  The ripping away of memories yet to happen.  A world that will never function in the same way again.

These types of grief are not mutually exclusive, all or nothing, right or wrong.  They easily masquerade as one another: Complete devastation hunkered behind a calm facade -or- A peaceful, anticipated passing that brutally shipwrecks its survivors.  And regardless of how it presents on the surface, grief yanks the rug from underneath your reality.  The experience unbalances everything, foundational parts of life -faith, community, love, hope, happiness- feel false or at least muddled beyond comprehension.  Upheaval has shifted your solid ground of before into a precarious wasteland of after.

Follow Megan Devine @refugeingrief

Maybe you've recently landed in the desert space of loss.  Maybe you've been here awhile, but fresh pain has brought everything to the surface anew.  Or perhaps a friend has been unwillingly transported to this godforsaken territory.  Bluntly put: It's awful here, but also it isn't a completely mysterious place.  Since the beginning of time, authors, scientists, teachers, preachers, librarians, atheists, athletes, politicians, along with regular Joes and Josephines have been forcibly (and daily) relocated to this wasteland.  Death is a part of life, as the discourse about living and dying is an essential part of the human experience.  Regarding this-will you allow me to share 5 (hopefully informative?) things about grief that I've learned since Margot died?

1.  Grief is NATURAL.

Grief is your body's natural response to (what your brain perceives as) an unnatural event.  Right after Margot died, my counselor said something I won't ever forget.  She said with an unexpected loss, the first 3-4 months your body and brain are processing what the hell happened.  Because yesterday I was pregnant, but today I'm not.  Or, there's no hurry to respond to Dad's random text last week...since he's not alive anymore.  What the what?  Day to day life takes on a surreal quality.  Everyone else continues living normally, but grieving parties stand behind a loss partition: Observing the former routines that governed their days.  A numb, removed outsider.  Grief scrambles everything.  Focus and memory are shot.  Emotions get muted (or magnified!) for awhile.  Sleep schedule aside, the body remains exhausted.  When deep grief happens, it throws all "regular" human functions off.  Fundamental brain and body operations get disrupted.  When a computer is acting wonky beyond reason, we unplug and hope for the best.  Grief -and the outworkings thereof- are the human version of a hard reset.

2.  Grief is MESSY.

I get slightly soapbox-y about this one.  Remember the "quiet grief" mentioned in the beginning?  Okay, it can exist appropriately in the world.  However.  Not all mourning can or should be shoved inside the tight parameters of that sort of refined, restrained output.   How many funerals have you attended where someone sharing memories about the deceased starts to get choked up and remarks, "I told myself I wouldn't do this."  Or "I'm going to try to keep it together."  Please stop apologizing for crying at a funeral.  STOP.IT.  Newlyweds don't apologize for kissing at their wedding; loved ones shouldn't apologize for ugly crying at a funeral.  These are simply different ways of expressing love.  Love and life exist in flux, aging and changing constantly, so choosing to honor them in just one way -at just one time- wouldn't reflect their evolving nature.  It can be shocking and uncomfortable to look into sorrow and be honest about the messy parts. It's emotional nakedness.  But it beautifully displays to others the significance love gains when (not if) confronted with inevitable loss.  Because only when we fully acknowledge the pain of death can we fully embrace the precious gift of life.

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3.  Grief is COMPLEX.

    * Relationships are complex.

When someone dies, the funeral is typically dedicated to the sainted-version of that human.  Which is understandable, especially for the public at large.  But for those in DEEP grief over the death of this person, there are no favors to be had by maintaining that angelic view of the deceased.  Because chances are, if you were well acquainted with the dearly departed, you shared some very HUMAN interactions over the course of their life.  It is easy to carry a deep burden of guilt about being a three-dimensional, flawed person who had past difficulties with a now two-dimensional, shiny memory of a person.  Listen: Remember the real person, ALL of them.  Over the last year of her life, I got to spend increased time with my spicy Grandma Bare.  Whenever I'd pack up to leave, she would huff a little and go, "Well, that was a short visit."  In response I'd gesture largely to the rest of her vacant apartment and say, "I don't see any of your other grandchildren here!"  That was my Grandma.  Time with family was what she loved most and she'd use any tactic -even sneaky, defamatory ones- to elongate those visits.   I miss her AND the spicy exchanges we had.  Don't let the missing of a person turn into blame about living a for-real life with them; it's unfair to you both.

    * The process of grief is complex.

As each individual is unique, each grieving process is equally unique.  But also, for as individualized as grief and loss can be, there are marked similarities in mourning displayed by certain personality types. Within these camps, decisions and actions are guided by different principles.  Myers-Briggs labels these people as "thinkers" and "feelers."  (Read this article for the entire Myers-Briggs 

summary of thinking and feeling.)  My therapist explained it like this: 

If I, as a feeler, am sitting in a grief mud puddle,

 each "type" of person would vary their approach to me. 

 A feeler would get down and BE with me in the mud to understand. 

 A thinker would say, "It's not helpful to stay in the mud; 

take my hand and get out."  

Neither approach -neither person- is "right" or "wrong," 

they are just intrinsically different.  

I cannot expect thinkers to be able to fully 

meet me in my feeling capacity, 

as thinkers cannot expect me to be able to fully 

meet them in their thinking capacity.  

This can be a tough pill to swallow.  It was (IS) for me, being a FEELER with loud grief tendencies.  Because I'd like to SEE with my eyes and HEAR with my ears that people are heartbroken about Margot being gone.  The quiet processing stuff (aka: A thinker's modus operandi) isn't good enough for MY daughter.  Clearly that line of thinking is not only unfair, it diminishes and devalues all alternate coping techniques.  What is healthy and healing for one, is healthy and healing for ONE.  Releasing others from grieving in the way you do, releases you from looking to their external validation to "fix" your internal wound.  (Ugh, oof, and ouch.  I'm still preaching this concept to my own damn self.)

4.  Grief is CUMULATIVE.

When presented with a steaming bowl of bereavement, an undesirable meal to say the least, the assumption is that THIS is your serving.  The sadness contained within the vessel in front (inside) of you, exists as its own untouched entity.  Unfortunately, loss doesn't operate with the methodology of a 5 star restaurant.  In one of my first posts after Margot died in December 2018, I described grief as a custom-made backpack of bricks.  What I've learned since then is that each loss doesn't get its own serving dish; the emotions compile -whether they be gravel, stone, or molten lava-  on top of the original (OG) source of deep grief.  So when my Uncle Doug, who lived with ALS for years, died in May 2019 -we didn't mourn him alone.  Later that year when Bronx, our huge lovable doggie, got incredibly sick out of the blue and had to be put down- we weren't only shedding tears over saying goodbye to a furry friend.  When 2020 took so much from everyone -including an additional year of Wren's childhood spent away from home- our parent hearts were breaking for all 3 of our children in different ways.  Grief compounds as loss accumulates; we don't experience each separate loss in a vacuum-sealed container.  Loss -like love- is something that links aspects of our story together.  Small things can spark joy, memory, sadness because they're each ingredients of that stone soup-y mess sloshing inside the backpack you're carrying.  (Perhaps I'm mixing my metaphors and library stories here.)  Anyway.  Regardless of why or how an emotion -especially one connected to that OG grief- surfaces, don't question its arrival.  Name which emotion it is: Calm, Longing, Loneliness, Peace.  By acknowledging this and sitting there a second, chances are your mind or body will alert you to the connection between then and now.  This can be a beautiful way for empathy, awareness, and compassion (for ourselves and others!) to inform our days.

5.  Grief has no TIMELINE.

I've already stated my case about grief being an expression of love.  The idea of love as a constant, steadying force is engrained within us.  However, after loss we are often told "to start moving on" and "things will be okay."  Both expressions imply that 1.  Grief is an unacceptable place of being.  and 2.  There is some future world  where your person's absence will be okay.  Nope and nope.  Granted, our friends and family don't want us to be profoundly unhappy or stuck in an unhealthy space.  That's understandable.  But the phrases above are usually wielded by the same ones who are singing the loudest, scrolling the longest, dancing the wildest, and drinking the hardest to avoid having to stare suffering directly in the eye.  By hurrying your sadness along, they are spared the discomfort of interacting with hard truths of life and death.  Don't even get me started on the "stages of grief" nonsense. Acknowledging different emotions connected with the normal mourning process is one thing; depicting them as a self-help metamorphosis of pain into a tidy, healed butterfly of betterness is quite another.  Love is ongoing, it doesn't vanish with the death of your person, so their absence WILL continue tugging at your heart in different ways at different times.  Because, as mentioned in a previous post: Present-tense love...can manifest as present-tense grief.   There is nothing wrong with this.  It isn't something to be moved beyond.  It simply is.  More than that, it reaffirms the significance of a relationship, the ongoing reality of missing your loved one at various ages and stages.  It confirms that, although each human lifestory has an assigned ending, the human lovestory knows no such bounds. 

Can I finish with a story?

This past Thanksgiving, I spent an abnormally large amount of time in church. Rangila dances with a group that accompanies special music presentations there, typically during holidays. Hence, LOTS of pew time that weekend. Wanna guess the sermon topic? "Giving Thanks in All Circumstances." Sigh.

My involvement in the Christian tradition -especially after Margot’s death- has uncovered a faulty perception that taints American thinking: The life experiences of gratitude, joy, and faith MUST exclude doubt and mourning. That if you cannot fathom giving thanks in your darkest moments, if you believe God has -in fact- given you more than you can handle, there is something amiss in YOUR spiritual self. This is complete and utter bull. It is wrong and deeply damaging to ones already battered and bleeding, especially those devoted to a belief system that seemingly discourages raw and honest expressions of sorrow. Friends, your sacred spark is as present within your rage and confusion as it is within your bliss and comfort. Discontent and doubt make you no less worthy of goodness. There are entire books of the Bible -Lamentations, Job, Psalms- that wouldn’t exist except for these emotions. Every feeling can be welcomed as a holy expression because it further connects us with ourselves, with each other, and with the Source of all communication.

That Sunday morning, I had to escape. The sermon's words pierced my most vulnerable spot: Margot. Out in the church lobby I found a seat and took a big breath, eyes silently filling. At times the cold fact of her loss hits fast and hard and leaves me stunned, gasping like a fish out of water. God, it is so incredibly lonely. Grief is intense and isolating. It doesn’t help that a majority of people distance themselves from you as if loss is contagious -or- they only engage with your suffering in ways comfortable for THEM. It leaves the grieving party feeling oddly offensive in their own sorrow, while the true problem is people can’t face pain straight on. This reality seemed glaringly apparent as I blinked back tears in the church foyer, surrounded by folks going about their business. Then a small upturned hand appeared in my periphery and reached up to grasp mine. Meet Jacqueline. A precious young adult, long raven hair double braided down her back, purple painted fingernails, sitting high in her fancy wheelchair. Jacqueline stared right at me and held on tight, her father informing me that she has no speech. (My reply: It’s okay, I talk enough for us both.) I stroked her hand, as her proud daddy bragged about Jack-Jack (her nickname) having lots of friends. “I can see why,” I said smiling. Being seen and acknowledged in your sadness is a gift. Perhaps without the hindrance of speech or pressures of “correct social behavior,”Jaqueline is better attuned and equipped to offer compassion to fellow humans.

To that end dearest ones, hear me: I see you. I acknowledge your suffering and affirm the horror of your experience. I am so sorry. Although you may be lonely please know that YOU ARE NOT ALONE in this.