On The Other Side Of Grief (continued 2)

What seems important is to recognize some of the signs of mourning and to know we will have a parallel process.

     Having dealt with grief from the inside out as a bereaved parent and a bereaved child, and from the other side of grief as a professional, there are a few other things I have learned.

            Sudden, shocking loss is one of the most difficult aspects of our humanness.  I am talking about any loss, not only death.  There is divorce, loss of jobs, loss of health and youth, moving, etc.  And the biggest surprise: Wonderful events always embody loss.  The birth of a child, marriage, a promotion, a new house and any success means leaving something behind.

            Most people move through grief in the context of family, friends and community.  Many with the help of their faith and church.  It is only a problem when a person gets stuck in one of the stages.  This brings me to the two most common questions asked.  First is "Well, how long will this take?" or "How long should it take?" Second is, "Is this normal?"

            In the attempt to answer these questions I have defined grief as either acute or chronic.  Acute grief is the normal, natural process that people move through.  Chronic grief is when the grieving process is shut down and stuck in a particular phase of the grieving process.  It doesn’t matter how or when this happens, if the process is shut down it will never be finished.

The first year is the hardest.  It is the hardest because it is the anniversary year.  Each holiday or special time is the first without the lost person, lost job, lost community, or whatever the particular loss might be.  Around the first year anniversary a marked change is usually evident.  Not that grieving is done, but the acute submersion is less.  I am deliberately not being very specific, because grief is so individualized.  To set time frames would compromise the respect and dignity of a person's right to grieve in their own time and in their own way.  There simply is no logical sequence to all the feelings - they come when they come, and not on schedule.

On The Other Side Of Grief (continued)

     This parallel process, between the bereft person and the helping person, is important not only to help the grieving person recover, but also to accommodate and create the inevitable new relationship with the bereft person.  Significant loss irrevocably changes people and therefore any and all relationships.  So part of the helping process is to accept the changed person and relationship along with their loss.

     There is so much to say about loss because the range of emotions and behaviors is so enormous.  Much has been written in recent years about the stages of grief that have become part of the common wisdom and seem pretty accurate.  However, the mourner

does not experience stages - just feelings.  Often these are strange, unfamiliar and very intense feelings that people have spent a lifetime learning to control.  So reassurance is one of the first responses anyone can give.  It is often helpful for people to at least understand what is happening to them.  Then they do not have the added burden of thinking something is wrong with them. What is "wrong," is that they have lost something or someone significant.

     It seems important to understand that any encounter with a grieving person is unsatisfying.  This is so because neither party can give the other what they want.  We do not have the power to give back what has been lost, and the grieving person cannot give us the smile and assurance that our help has made everything all right.  The greater the loss, the longer this will be true.  However, over time our help does help.  It is analogous to applying salve to a wound.  The salve will not magically heal, but over time the salve plus the healing power of the body, will at some point heal the wound.

On The Other Side Of Grief

Over the years, since 1978, I have heard a refrain that troubles me and seems unfair. It’ s the frequent response I hear from those around the bereaved person.  So often I hear people say, “Oh I was just a friend” or “I am just the cousin.”  As though their grief isn’t as valid somehow.  It is.  I don’t know how one measures the degree of pain for the death of a loved person.  “Mine can’t be as bad as theirs” is what I often hear.  Perhaps, who knows, but whatever degree of pain anyone feels is as important to his or her life as it is to the central figures in the tragedy.   In answer to that mistaken assumption I wrote the following article, “On The Other Side of Grief” for all those who are on the other side yet part of the inner circle.  Shutting down grief always creates distance and safety; getting close risks being vulnerable to loss once again.

     Just as grief is the natural and normal human response to loss, so is our response to a grieving person.  It is very difficult to see someone we know who has experienced a great loss and not want to "do something" to help.  Both grief and the response to grief have gotten lost along the way.  This essay then is about describing and supporting our natural and normal responses to someone else's grief.  It is a parallel process and embodies similar stages, but requires only the awareness to trust what we can do to help.

     This parallel process is important not only to help the grieving person recover, but also to accommodate and create the inevitable new relationship with the bereft person.  Significant loss irrevocably changes people and therefore any and all relationships.  So part of the helping process is to accept the changed person and relationship along with their loss.

A Different Kind Of Grief

This is so different from Sharon’s death

Took me awhile to recognize what it is

Not the gut wrenching, unending pain

Not the huge crescendo of feelings

Like a wave crashing on rocks

It is more insidious, like erosion of my soul

Just feeling off and vaguely unhappy

No identifiable problem, nothing to name as wrong

It’s hard to deal with something so ephemeral and indirect

Takes the form of self-criticism, as I can see nothing else to explain my sad, blaming feelings, except some fault of mine.

That helps to identify what is wrong and now I can continue to work through the loss.  The feelings get so disconnected from the event it is hard to bring them together.

Good luck with yours

A New Life

A new life on it’s way

Happiness and anticipation for me

A son and wife, much loved

My rainbow child

Sadness that I will never share

That time with her

So what will I do?

I am torn in two

By my joy and my grief

I guess I will feel both sides

Life is a circle where one ends

The other begins

The cycle of life goes on

Where joy and grief meet

It is turbulent and rough.

Comforting a Grieving Parent: Twelve Dos and Don’ts for Loved One

• Be aware that the bereaved parent’s grief may trigger your own. If you haven’t dealt with the grief of your own losses, you may be shocked by how upset you become. Don’t pull away, and don’t squelch your own emotions. It’s fine to cry with the grieving person and to cry later on your own. Grief needs to be expressed.

• Don’t abandon the grieving person. Your silence only adds to her pain. Shechtman writes, “What I have found most helpful over the years are those who chose to be straight with me. It is the silence and abandonment that adds to the pain. I always thought it was a hilarious statement for people to say, ‘I was afraid that I might upset you.’ How much more upset can a person be?”

• Know that you can’t help her right away. Over time, though, your efforts will make a difference. “We do not have the power to give back what has been lost, and the grieving person cannot give us the smile and assurance that our help has made everything all right,” reflects Shechtman. “The greater the loss, the longer this will be true. However, over time our assistance does help. It is analogous to applying salve to a wound. The salve will not magically heal, but over time, the salve, plus the healing power of the body, will at some point heal the wound.”

• Pray and send positive thoughts. This helps more than you may realize. “An important piece that helped me through that very difficult time was a persistent sense of being ‘held up’ by all the prayers, good wishes, and positive vibes sent my way,” writes Shechtman. “I am not a religious person, but that sense was powerful and difficult to ignore. It was the spiritual equivalent of many hands holding up a person during a ‘trust fall.’ I am eternally thankful for all those good wishes.”

• Expect the bereaved to go through a long period of depression. It’s okay. This is when the major work of grieving is done. “Grief goes on longer than anyone wants it to, or thinks it should,” writes Shechtman. “Everyone gets sick of it, including the bereft person—and still it goes on. As helpers, once again, we feel our own helplessness and impotence, and we want to withdraw. That is a normal and natural response, and is to be trusted.  Some distance is necessary at this point because so much of the work is private and internal.

“Just sitting or walking together, or a brief handclasp, is all that is required, and the most effective way to get through this time,” she adds.

• Let the person grieve however she wants to grieve. Your intolerance of her choices is more about your comfort than hers. “I am fiercely for a person grieving any way he or she chooses,” writes Shechtman. “I once had a young woman client who lost her husband three weeks after they married. Her choice was to wear black for a full year after his death. She got no end of flak from others. Again and again, the message she heard was, ‘Get over it’—or, more accurately, ‘Don’t bother me.’”

• Watch out for chirpiness. Sometimes a grieving person keeps herself at a safe distance from others. She may seem strong and in control and may not bother anyone else with her problems. There is a strange incongruence in effect and behavior that does not fit the circumstances. Shechtman calls this “chirpiness.”

“Chirpiness is probably the result of a lifetime of ‘being there’ for everyone else and feeling too terrified of the vulnerability of ‘breaking down’ and needing to ask for something from others,” she writes. “This is most likely related to early abandonment issues, and as a youngster this person was required to perform far beyond his or her developmental abilities. The way to help someone in this terrible dilemma is to gently insist on closeness. In short, to offer the help this person is so terrified of asking for.”

• Keep your relationship honest. Secret, unspoken feelings create distance. Twenty-six years after her daughter’s death, Shechtman developed breast cancer—creating a “double whammy” of grief.  She credits her husband Morrie’s ability to express his darker feelings with keeping them close during those terrible months.

“He was able to tell me how angry he was that I had cancer,” she says. “If he had not, those secret, unspoken feelings would have made everything more difficult, and I would have wondered what was wrong that we couldn’t be intimate.”

• Don’t let the person hide behind her grief forever. Force her to re-engage. “I will never forget how a friend of mine helped me move on,” writes Shechtman. “About two years after my daughter’s death, he commented that I used her death like a black ace, to hide behind. I, of course, was very hurt and indignant at first, but as time passed, I realized he was right…I was a bit wobbly about taking the risk of loving and losing again…Sometimes the hardest things to say are the kindest. I am glad he and others cared enough for me to want me back.”

• Never ask, “Shouldn’t you be over it by now?” Believe it or not, people do ask this question, even if not in so many words, especially after a lot of time has passed. “The further one gets from the funeral, the less tolerance others have for one’s grief,” says Shechtman. “But bereavement is a condition that never clears up. The loss of a child is a never-ending process of feeling wounded and regaining wholeness. Telling grieving parents to get over their grief would be like telling an amputee not to miss her arm.”

• No matter how much time has passed, acknowledge special occasions. This is your chance to be a healing force in the grieving person’s life. On what would have been Sharon’s 37^th birthday, Shechtman’s friend Deb showed up with a birthday cake and fifteen balloons, one for each year of Sharon’s life. They ate the cake and threw Sharon’s piece over the side of the deck. Then, they let the balloons fly away, the first five individually (each accompanied by a shouted message to Sharon), the last ten together.

“We stood there together and watched them sail away till they were all gone,” writes Shechtman. “With each balloon I let her go a little bit more, again, and the final release of the other ten felt wonderful. The silent choice was to open my heart a bit wider for that healing closeness that happens in intimate moments.”

• Offer to be on the grieving person’s “List of Ten.” Shechtman writes, “I developed a list of about ten folks I trusted and would call, one by one, to see if they were up to my grief, right then. There was always someone on my list who was there with comfort and solace. Grief requires comfort, a hard thing to keep asking for.

“Get on this list,” she advises. “Don’t wait for the person to ask. Tell her, ‘I am here for you, even if you need to cry at 2 a.m.’ Then, if she does call, do everything in your power to talk as long as she needs to. Your willing and patient presence is the greatest gift you can give someone who is grieving.”

# # #

Dreams

Sometimes

I dream

that

she is

still

alive.

Then I awake

&

know

the

truth.

At those

times

I

am

glad

you

are there.