Seeing Our Life in a New Way

 Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James were thinkers and writers, and each of them faced the traumatic death of a person they loved. They responded to grief differently, but the deaths caused them to change direction and each discovered his life’s work. 

 

Prostate Distillate

 

If you’re a man, you are likely to develop prostate cancer at some point. This will generally happen when you’re older/old, and in most cases, it will be so slow growing that you will die of something else before your prostate becomes a problem. That’s good news.

Gratitude and the Long Arc of Grief

             I’m sitting in a cemetery in Peru with the dead, thinking about Hope’s journey to a different Peru, sorrow for an entire culture of people, and trying to describe how moved I am by the breadth of her book The AfterGrief. 

Today is the fall equinox and dry leaves are beginning to drop from the trees and rest on graves in central Illinois, which means that October and Halloween will soon be here when we will dress our children up as skeletons and images of the living dead, but we still won’t talk about death.

 

            In her book, Hope Edelman discusses death, grief, and living, and includes so many insights that I won’t try to summarize everything here. My marked-up copy attests to all of her findings about the clarity and complexities of grief that I want to think about more. 

 

Getting Married Again

 

One of my readers asked: 

I know you are still examining the loss of Evelyn. I also know you are remarried. How did you get from grieving for Evelyn to being able to open yourself and commit to another relationship? Somehow you make the transition. How?

Many thanks, Ellen

 

Dear Ellen,

 

Losing a spouse is so traumatic and heartbreaking that we’re tempted to close the doors on ever getting this close to anyone again. What we want is for our spouses to not be dead and to have our old lives back, but these are not options.

 

Losing Evelyn devastated me. We were young when she died, and I didn’t know how to grieve. Because my friends were also young, they didn’t know how to help, although several tried, and for their compassion I am forever grateful.

 

What You Can Say and Do

The CBS Sunday morning program this week ran a feature on grief that included an interview with Rebecca Soffer of Modern Loss, a website that shares personal stories of loss. One of the points brought up was that many people who want to help those who are grieving feel uneasy about saying anything because they don’t want to make the grieving feel worse. 

Below are a few suggestions for what you can say and do. I am grateful to Modern Loss for publishing several of my short essays on grief. You can find the links below.

Widowed Fathers

I have read few books that speak honestly and in detail about being a widowed father. Compared to the number of grief memoirs written by women, there aren’t many written by men. There should be more of both.

 

A recent book by Donald Rosenstein and Justin Yopp is excellent—The Group: Seven Widowed Fathers Reimagine Life. It shares the stories of men in a support group that met monthly and talked through their struggles of suddenly having to raise children as a solo parent. As they shared their insights and emotions, they helped each other navigate and survive their new challenge. 

 

The Thereness of Grief

Michelle Burke’s poem “Diameter” raises a bunch of “what ifs.” In the poem, she flies across the country to be with a friend who is grieving, a friend who is wondering if there is a there in the afterlife, and if so, is the one who died waiting for her there?

Men and Their Ocean of Emotions

(Finding grief books to recommend to you that were written by men continues to be a challenge. Of the books I’ve reviewed, 23 were by women but only 6 were by men. I have found women to be more honest, compassionate, and insightful. They speak of the heart, and not just what they thought. Through my blog, I am trying to overcome the male deficit, was well as share what all who grieve might find helpful. - Mark)

Stupid Things That Caring People Say About Grief

There is a difference between sharing words of sympathy, empathy, and compassion, and to the one who is grieving, it’s a big difference. Sympathy uses stock phrases that convey civility but not heart, and says things like this: “I’m sorry you’re suffering. This has to be hard, but I’m glad it’s not me.” Empathy moves the listener closer: “I lost my father last year so I know how grief consumes your every thought.” Compassion takes the listener right in: “Let me sit with you for a while and you can tell me what your grief is doing.”

Hiking Through Grief

            When men grieve, they often need to do something physical to help them along. Some men build things with their hands. I go hiking. My goal each day was to reach a scenic viewpoint, but more importantly I wanted to find a place along the way where I connected to something solid and real.

            In the months after my wife’s death, home was an unending flurry of details, doubts and despair, and I was unable to focus on anything for very long. Buddhism calls this “monkey mind,” when hundreds of thoughts are screeching, chattering, and jumping around, wanting my attention.

Sex is Not an Emotion

What do widowers want when they begin dating? 

My essay at the Good Men Project. 

I am grateful for Sarah Marty-Schlipf and Wendy Fontaine's insights.

https://goodmenproject.com/sex-relationships/sex-not-emotion-dg/

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.

Artifacts Left Behind

When a loved one dies, possessions are left behind and we have to decide what to keep and toss. While many possessions hold fond memories, some do not. A few hold special meaning, are symbolic of pivotal events in our life, or just hold something crucial of the other person’s spirit.

            One of Ev’s pottery bowls had me in this quandary.

Helping Men Grieve

My new post at The Huffington on encouraging grieving men to share their emotions.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mark-liebenow/we-need-to-encourage-grieving-men_b_9770988.html

Joe Biden - Public Grieving

Joe Biden and grief were in the news, notably his interview with Stephen Colbert and his speech to military survivors. Everything Biden said is known to those who are grieving, yet his speaking about grief is important for a number of reasons.

One, he’s a man.

Putting Grief on the Page

               (photo of the massive roots of a sequoia tree that fell over)

                        Strange utterances, horrible pronouncements, accents 
                        of anger, words of suffering, voices shrill and faint, 
                        and beating hands.

                                                                        Dante

The death of someone we dearly loved tosses us into a hellish pit of broken things. Grief is the journey of picking our way through the rubble and finding our way back up.

Delayed Grieving

One of my essays was just published by Modern Loss. It’s about camping with rock climbers in Yosemite and all of the things I left unsaid when they headed off to climb, knowing that sometimes climbers die. You can read it at - http://modernloss.com/looking-el-capitan/

There are good reasons for not dealing with grief. We have to go to work if we want to keep our job. The children have to be taken to school and helped with their homework. We have to go shopping and cook if we want to eat.

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

Dancing with my Demons

“I loved her not for the way she dances with my angels, but for the way the sound of her name could silence my demons.” Christopher Poindexter

To tell you the truth, I loved Evelyn for both.

I didn’t celebrate life well before I met her, nor did I fully acknowledge my negative side. Deny and deflect were my modes of coping. I was dependable and dull. I got work done. I was disconnected from the emotional highs and lows, from positive and negative feelings, as well as from the energy that each one brings.

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

Cairn of Stone

I gather the heavy stones,

stack them in a cairn above your ashes,

for what has died inside,

stack sorrow and anger,

despair, rage alongside the grave

of loneliness, devotion, love.

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

Men and the Death of Their Fathers: Neil Chethik

Neil Chethik, FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads, Hachette Books, 2001.

            Neil Chethik provides insights into how men grieve death in his book, FatherLoss: How Sons of All Ages Come to Terms with the Deaths of Their Dads.

            Through interviews and questionnaires of hundreds of men who lost a father, some when they were in their teens and all the way up to men in their sixties, Chethik presents the scope of male reactions. Some men were on good terms with their fathers when they died, others were not. Some were physically taking care of their fathers in their last years, while others hadn’t seen their fathers in decades.