Grief Words

 

Writing the Shadows

            We need the words. How are we going to talk about grief without the words?

 

It’s difficult to talk about grief when the language we know comes from the back of a cereal box. We stumble around, find a few words that seem to fit, find other words that fit better, and our vocabulary begins to expand.

 

Words enable us to describe the contours of our grief.

 

Many of us did not learn how to speak about grief from our families because they didn’t want to talk about it. If they spoke about their grief in more than a few terse sentences, they did so in hushed tones, hoping this would be an amulet and keep Death away. 

 

We are tired of hiding our sorrow away, tired of having the devastation of our grief denied. When we share the words that we have discovered with others who understand grief, we build up a common language, and help each other verbalize what we couldn’t before. 

 

            Sonya Huber, who lives with rheumatoid arthritis, said that those who have chronic pain also have to create their own common language. Describing pain is not easy, and sometimes Sonya finds herself in a gray zone between pain and her ability to describe it. By paying attention and attaching words, she can talk to her pain and find out what it wants. Her discoveries and insights are described in her book Pain Woman Takes Your Keys (which is a great title).

 

            Give your grief a voice, and listen to it.

 

            Most doctors don’t talk about how pain feels. They want to quantify pain objectively on a scale from 1 to 10. Sonya discovered the McGill Pain Questionnaire that uses adjectives that patients have shared that are actually useful, words like itchy, tingling, smarting, flickering, pounding, throbbing flashing, drilling, tiring, squeezing, nagging,penetrating.

 

Grievers need their own list of adjectives. When we find the words to express our grief, we release some of its tension and work with it. Being able to pinpoint our grief also teaches us that there are many shades to emotions. There don’t come in just seven colors. There are at least 96, according to my Crayola box. If you say your emotion feels red, is it crimson, ruby, or pink? Maybe it feels purple, violet, or cobalt blue.

 

            Turn on the lights in your house of grief. Invite people in to share and learn.

 

We write about grief to understand what is happening to us and how our world is changing. We write because when people ask what they can do to help, we want to offer them an idea of where to start. We write to help our friends prepare for the time when grief comes home to them. 

 

What words do you use to describe your grief?

 

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            Last year, Kara Bowman, a grief therapist, published a book of poems that expresses three aspects of grief: when it is fresh, as the hard reality settles in, and adjusting to your new life. In Heartbreak to Hope, she shares images and emotions from her clients who have experienced a variety of losses, like the deaths of infant and spouses, dementia, a widower asking for more fudge for his ice cream after having to bury his wife, and wondering if you have to mourn the death of someone you didn’t like. Bowman shapes their responses with insights from her own experiences of grief into poems that are honest.