The Torrent of Grief, Its Pain and Its Value
/Grief arrives for many reasons. We often identify the death of a partner, spouse, friend, child, parent, or colleague as the deepest form of grief – and rightfully so. We’ve witnessed the pain of this kind of grief etched on survivors’ faces. I thought myself that I would lose my mother within a few months of my father’s death. She faded, both physically from not eating and energetically from lethargy. As the ever-present bloom bled from her cheeks, I prepared myself just in case. Within a year, though, she pulled out of the Grand Canyon of her grief, beauty slowly returned to her 78-year-old face. Her step once again had a spring in it.
Grief rides along with many other situations, though. Sometimes we lose sight of that. Recently, a woman who is so dear to me stared down depression which had hit her with a wallop and that feeling of arriving “out of the blue”. As she worked her way through the layers of that condition, among the root causes was this: She admitted to still grieving the loss of her old dog eighteen months earlier and recognized, finally, their relationship: “She was my child.” Having pushed that pain away, it arrived ferociously with insistence as part of her enquiry. She added it to the mix of emotions to sit with in order to work through the depression.
Job loss or underemployment triggers grief and accompanying anxiety. We train ourselves and each other to hide this particular cause out of fear, embarrassment, pride. In a culture, however, where the first question after meeting someone often is, “What do you do?”, talking about employment fears seems easier to bury than express.
Then there is the grief of “the breakup – end of a marriage, the call from the boyfriend or girlfriend who you thought really might be “the one”, the demise of a lifelong friendship. These kinds of losses tend to get brushed over in our culture. “Oh, she’s (he’s) young. Still plenty of time.” Or, “Better now than later.” Or, “It wasn’t meant to be.” A 20-something friend of mine suddenly finds herself in this valley of grief and knows all too well the fatigue and heartache of facing “having to start over.”
In these examples of grief – the loss of a pet, job, dating relationship, too often considered the “lesser” ones – the blueprints for recovery blur when compared to death of a person close to us.
How can we support those whose tender hearts cry out to us?
1. Listen. Listen with your heart, your eyes, your arms. Active listening is like salve on a wound for the grieving person.
2. Resist the temptation to jump into your own grief stories. We do this to be kind, of course, and also to soothe our own discomfort. Hold your stories for another time. The only story is the one someone newly grieving is telling you.
3. “I don’t know” are three important words at this time to those unanswerable questions: Will he come back to me? Do you think I’ll find another job soon? Should I get another dog right away? When you say “I don’t know”, you help to ground the person who is grieving in the present moment and avoid building false hope. Just listen. Listen.
4. Ask what the grief feels like in the grieving person’s body. The more you can be a support to someone in helping them to “locate” their grief, the more they can begin to see grief as a visitor who has arrived and sooner or later will leave.
5. Be aware of latent grief residing in your own body, heart, and mind, which can be triggered as you listen to someone. If it is, invite your observer to come forward and deal with it even as you continue to turn your full attention to the person in front of you. Later, you can sit with your own grief and examine it.
Like all emotions, grief is a messenger. Though we would rather not hear the message – much less process it – it is precisely the hearing and processing that helps to release it, that returns the bloom to the cheek, the spring to the step, and the opening once again of the heart.
