The Beginnings of Grief: Getting Through
It takes heartache and time to move forward while honoring the past
As a psychologist I’ve helped many people negotiate the rough terrain of getting through the agony of losing a loved one. The difficulty in “letting go” of that pain can be overwhelming.
The death of a dream
Our connections to loved ones tell us who we are. They keep us living in trust, in comfort, in laughter.
They lead us to look forward into a life that is full of possibility. They make us brave. They kick our butts towards change.
They are the invisible lines that are the boundaries that say, “You belong to me.” And from birth to death, there are few greater statements on can make about another.
So, what happens when the connections unravel or snap?
What do we do when the future lies?
Those were the issues I focused on with my mourning patients. They were long, heart-breaking journeys in which people were stuck in the past, but knew they had to face a future.
My turn
But now, I’m getting major league training in loss. Within a month, my mother died and my divorce from my husband became final.
Neither of these was a surprise. My mother had dementia and my husband left me for another woman several years ago.
The finality of both knocked the wind out of me. I had enjoyed loving, secure relationships with both. I didn’t know how I could suffer so much and still breathe. I’ve been irretrievably lost.
“Coping”
People ask me how I am “coping,” like it’s some holy grail of surviving adversity. Most don’t even know what it means.
Is it that you are going about your life like nothing much has happened? Or is it that you’re a puddle on your kitchen floor because you’re really “getting in touch with your feelings?”
I think the approach that coping is to be “achieved” is overrated. In the throes of an agonizing loss, the question is more, “Is your heart still beating?” “How hard is it to inhale and exhale?" or “How hard is to slap a fake smile on your face?
In the middle of a crisis, we get hit with the need to evaluate of how well we’re reacting to getting slammed.
The self-help literature loves the notion of coping. We read about feelings, stages, and healing. But they are guidelines at best, not road maps. No book can tell you how you must “cope.”
When we are smacked down in our lives, our pain and our reaction to it, is highly individual and must be respected as such.
A person who “looks good’ and denies pain, may seem to be dealing with their crisis stoically at first, only to fall apart down the road.
And a person who looks like a basket case, may actually find a foothold and climb slowly, but with stability, back to life.
Coping is really, just reacting, adapting, finding ways of walking through enormous pain and uncertainty, using your strengths to offset your vulnerabilities.
“Lowest common denominator” living
In my experience of separation, divorce, and death, adapting means respecting my pain, finding ways of expressing it and taking care of the basics of myself and my life. That’s it. I call it “lowest common denominator living.”
These are the ways I have gotten through Month Two. I’ve been:
1. getting out of bed every morning and immediately crying for at least 15 minutes. 2. putting on something that barely qualifies as clothing, even if I wore it the day before. 3. “sort of” making my bed. 5. “showing up,” Going through the motions. 6. counting out the number of hours until I can go to bed. 7. counting out the number of hours before my sleepless self can get out of bed. 8. going to the movies 3 times a week, even if it’s stuff I don’t like 9. writing only one “I hate your guts” letter to my ex-husband and gripping my hand still so I don’t hit the Send button. (Saving each letter for a scrapbook of vitriol I can pull out when you need the comfort of contained, pure rage)
So, I’m doing pretty well. And I’m wretched. It’s all relative
Being alone
There is something so difficult about being alone. Especially being alone when it’s not your choice. You stop yourself mid-sentence as you call into the other room, “Hey, let's get dumplings from…” or “Have seen my blue…”
When you’re alone, your words just bounce back- “return to sender.” They echo into an emptiness that underlines your solitary existence.
I miss sitting with my husband, slumped on the dumpy couch, keeping up a running commentary on the crappiness movie we were watching. I miss the marriage of our laughter- his and mine. I hear my laughter now, but it is brief and lonely.
I miss the automatic dialing to my mother. To ask for her meatloaf recipe or make a shameless bid for sympathy when I’m sick.
For the first time in my life, I am truly lonely. It’s a hollowed- out feeling. That old question...” If a tree falls and no one hears it…,” finds its translation in, “If Martha falls and no one hears her…” I get frightened by the what if’s, fearing that I could croak, and I wouldn’t be found for days.
But it’s more than that. The presence of another person somehow validates our existence. They are our witnesses, our acknowledgements. They’re the stamp on the hand that says, “She was here.”
The best we can say about ourselves with people in those early months of loss, is that we’re “company.” Forget about being “good company.”
Facing what we’ve lost
I miss my husband. I miss our family. I am still furious that after 43 years of marriage, he decided that we were not going to grow old together. He found a woman he loved more than me. And even writing that sentence feels like getting kicked in the teeth.
After a long separation I am still haunted by the questions that shake my confidence and undermine my identity, “Why wasn’t I enough?” “What did she have that I didn’t?” “How did you make such a rapid transition from me to her?” As a psychologist, I could figure out why other marriages hit the skids, but not my own.
Even though I am an ex-wife. I’m still a mother to my daughter. But I’m not ready to give up being a daughter to my mother.
Our family Bible lists the entries and exits of family members. In five generations, mine is the only “ex.” Does it get crossed out? Does it get an asterisk like the baseball players whose record achievements are muted by their failures?
All I know is that the first thing to happen is to register the gut punch of loss.
A patient of mine, a widow at 45, could not let go of her fury at her husband because she attributed his lung cancer to the cigarettes he refused to quit.
Until she was able to let go of her anger, she was unable to mourn the loss of what had been a good marriage. And until she accepted her grief, she was unable to move forward.
Redefining your identity
Knowing who you are after the tornado of a loss means you are left to pick up all of the scraps and broken pieces that are left behind. It feels like you’ve lost the connective tissue that holds everything together.
Being part of a pair provides us with a huge chunk of our identity. Who are we, now that we are solitary?
After a long separation I am still haunted by the questions that shake my confidence and undermine my identity, “Why wasn’t I enough?” “What did she have that I didn’t?” “How did you make such a rapid transition from me to her?”
As a psychologist, I could figure out why other marriages hit the skids, but not my own.
Last week when I went to the doctor’s, I had to fill out the blasted form they give you before every damn appointment. “Name” (easy) and then right under that is “Marital Status.” I have a goddamn sore throat, how is this relevant?”
The rote check mark I have given “Married” for 43 years is now retired. Now there’s “Single.” Then “Divorced.” What am I? “Single” sounds younger, it implies potential. I check that one. Then I think a single woman of my age would really be a spinster. So, I erase it and check “Divorced.”
A very real consequence of being “single” is often an initial outpouring of invitations from people who are together with a spouse or love interest. But many people who have lost a partner notice that over time, they are not included in activities of pairs.
As a result of my loss, who am I?
With the loss of a love, we feel the full gamut of emotions — abandoned, empty, angry, lost, humiliated, wounded and so, so sad. The caring and support we get naturally recedes with time, much earlier than our grief, leaving us the task to care for ourselves.
Support
While it’s important over time to step up to the task of moving on with our lives, there is no demand for when and how we do it, especially in the acute phase of grief.
Other people are uncomfortable with the intensity of our grief, and will often cheerlead, suggest, or try to cajole us out of it. It may make us feel that they don’t understand or reject the depth of our pain.
Gently, but firmly respond the way you want, but know that usually their clumsiness comes out of good intentions.
People who have been through loss themselves are less likely to dictate your recovery, and they may eventually be very helpful in listening and sharing experiences that may be helpful to you. I’ve found that people with whom I have little in common, have been most helpful to me in sharing wisdom gained from the process of grief we have shared.
Soothing
While time is the great healer, there’s not much we can do about it.
Grieving is a time of balancing the internal pain with an increasing attention to the external world. It may just be taking a short walk and guiding yourself to look at the signs of the season or notice the children playing down the street. It does not have to be profound or social.
Establish an array of things that make you feel good (not great, but good). Eating, watching the same movie over and over, listening to music that reaches more deeply than words. Try not to sleep too much.
Allow yourself to live deeply in memory for a while. Experience those remnants of the lost one: photos and videos, the smells, the tastes, the touches, the voices that come to you in quiet moments.
Write. It is an effort, but research has demonstrated that keeping some sort of a journal is helpful in stimulating the neurotransmitters in our brains that are responsible for making us feel better.
I’m not talking about turgid prose. It could be lists. Or memories. Or “Things I Don’t Miss.” Not only is it something helpful in the moments of your early mourning, it becomes a document along your journey.
Do something different every day. Take a different path on your drive home. Do something to your hair. Pick an unfamiliar food at the grocery store. Help someone out.
This won’t do much to your sorrow, but it will remind you that an undercurrent of your life still goes on, and that you are still a player in it. It is a wisp of a belief in your unfolding future.
Make a room in your house for sorrow. “Closure” is bullshit. Grief is a matter of degree. If you fight too hard against it, you will fail. It is far better to know that the person you lost will never evaporate inside you, and that’s just the way it is.
It’s far better than denying it and having it haunt you relentlessly down the road. To take your grief and say, “You can stay, here’s your room, but you can’t have the run of the house,” puts you in control of the life of loss.
Remembering without agony
Today my sister called and reminded me of her husband’s death 30 years ago, in the parking lot of Home Depot. One minute, he was opening a car door and the next minute he was dead. He was 37. My sister was 30. We all adored him. It was one of the most crushing events in our family.
She said, “I can remember all of it. Every second. The sounds, the snow on the ground, telling Chelsea” (their little girl). While we all remember and feel it, there is a solitary nature of it that will never disappear. And it’s not supposed to.
Our grief is the dividend we pay for loving.
Grief has an excellent memory. It just loses its paralysis and intense sorrow over time.
In a gorgeous poem, “What the Living Do,” Marie Howe writes of the transition from the oppressive yearning that comes with early grief, to its transition to the possibility of a future with more joy than pain. I long for this feeling and wish it for my fellow travelers:
“…there are moments, walking, when I catch a glimpse of myself in the window glass, say, the window of the corner video store, and I am gripped by a cherishing so deep for my own blowing hair, chapped face, and unbuttoned coat that I’m speechless: I am living. I remember you.”
