Is Grief a Room or the House?

             What is the most devastating loss we can experience? Is it the death of a parent, spouse or partner, child, pet, or best friend? Or is it the loss of a marriage, the destruction of a wilderness, belief in our self-worth, or trust that our society will do the right thing? 

 

One of Suzanne Roberts’s friends said that ‘grief used to be one room in the house, but after their son died, grief was the only room.’

 

Sharing a Cup of Tea

             Each year we set out full of good intentions and resolutions. We set up plans for self improvement, with ideas and strategies for what we can do every day to make ourselves better (physically, mentally, spiritually). Take them with a pinch of salt. Rather than create a list of 20 things that you have to do every day (which I did for almost a year and ended up improved but more miserable than happy), resolve to do what nourishes you.

 

Boxes of Imagined Grief

 My friends didn’t know what to say to me because Ev died young and unexpectedly. No one had taught my generation about grief, not what to say or do or expect. No one knew to tell me that life was over as I had known it, or that I would be thrown into a land cratered by death for more than a year.

 

Yet everyone had a Box of Imaginary Grief, even if they had never lost anyone close, filled with odds and ends of what they thought sorrow might be like. Whenever I came over, they dug around in their box, took out something braided with hope, and handed it to me to comfort my grief. Then they expected the dinner party to go on as planned. As you might have guessed, this wasn’t what I needed. 

 

The Worst Grief

Sometimes when we’re feeling bitten hard by grief, or just snarky, we try to prove that we are hurting the most, and that our grief is the worst that anyone has ever experienced. In the entire world. Ever.

I’ve lost a wife in her 40s, three beloved pets (well, one not so beloved), both parents (one to dementia), all my grandparents, a pair of in-laws, a friend to AIDS, two to murder, several to cancer, one to suicide, and a number of young friends to car accidents. As I walk among the tombstones in my personal cemetery, it would be hard to put them on a scale of the worst because they each hit me hard in different ways.

When Friends Die

Book: Friend Grief and Men: Defying Stereotypes, Victoria Noe

The death of a friend can hit as hard as any death.

But the grief we hear about most of the time involves a parent, spouse or a child. We also read about the trauma when a beloved pet dies, and this is not to be taken lightly. Often overlooked is the grief that people feel when a friend dies.

When Friends Visit

Talking about grief with friends who haven’t lost someone close is a grab bag experience; you don’t know what reaction you’ll get. The reactions can range from sympathy to empathy to compassion on the positive side, and from indifference to anger to fear on the negative, as if your closeness with death will rub off on them.

You want the people with compassion.

* If you would like to read the rest of this post, let me know and I’ll send it to you. *