GRIEF | RELATIONSHIPS | SADNESS FOR WHAT MIGHT HAVE BEEN

When Grief Has Nowhere to Go

Not everyone is allowed to say goodbye

In 2006, I was driving home from a Thanksgiving trip to Florida when my daughter texted me.

“Mom, when you stop, call me.”

Absolute, ice-cold terror filled my heart. I knew right then some bad thing had happened, some very bad thing. I just didn’t know who it was I had lost.

And so I kept driving. As long as I kept driving, as long as I didn’t call her back, that Terrible Thing had not happened. Not yet.

Until it had.

“Mom,” she began, with a shaky voice, and couldn’t go on. You never want to hear that voice from a child.

“You’re scaring me!” I practically shouted as I sat in my car at a rest area along the Interstate. Alone, as always.

Let me tell you what happens in such a moment: even if you aren’t religious, in your heart, you begin pleading with God that it isn’t this one or that one. You learn in that instant whom it is you can live without and whom you cannot, where your priorities truly are. You learn whom you love the most — your heart doesn’t lie.

Don’t let it be my grandson. Please, God. Not my Jamie.

Then she said, “Mom, Daddy died today.”

And although I didn’t know it at the time, with that sentence, my life as I knew it was over, too. I wasn’t sorry I left him and all his lies behind, I didn’t regret saving myself. Still, I never wanted him to die.

But my daughters would never quite be able to forgive me for their loss.

It always seems so strange to me that the day after a traumatic event, the sun comes up, and the world goes on, just as if nothing had ever happened. People are going to work, to school, to the grocery store.

How can everything be the same, when nothing is the same? That’s what’s so difficult to accept.

Life went on, but it was never the same again. My children’s favorite parent had died suddenly, tragically, and here I was, the person they believed had broken his heart, still obscenely living.

And terribly grieving his loss. He wasn’t always what he had become. He was my childhood sweetheart, the person I grew up with, my mate of over three decades, the only person on Earth who loved my kids and grands the same way I did.

I met him when we were 14, and he died at 55. Much too soon.

It isn’t always easy to identify grief because of societal pressures around what is or isn’t acceptable to grieve. The concept has widened in our modern times, but still, not all grief is treated equally. Far from it.

To ‘disenfranchise’ means to deny a right or privilege of some nature. Disenfranchised grief occurs when the grief you’re feeling isn’t supported by society or recognized as legitimate. Also known as hidden grief or sorrow, disenfranchised grief is often not acknowledged, validated, or understood.

It certainly isn’t voiced or discussed — you learn that fast. You’re not one of the approved mourners. You aren’t allowed your sadness. It’s tiresome.

Often, you don’t even understand it yourself. You aren’t ready for it. It comes at you sideways, out of nowhere, and takes your legs out from underneath you.

At a time when individuals most need support and understanding, disenfranchised grievers aren’t given permission to grieve. By societal standards, their grief is invalidated. It doesn’t signify. Worse yet, grief is often treated with anger, impatience, or disapproval.

What are you trying to do? This is our grief, not yours. Who do you think you are? You don’t have the right.

It’s a special kind of Hell, one you don’t forget. And grief that cannot be expressed doesn’t die — it comes home to live with you. You simply tend it all by yourself.

My ex had died suddenly, tragically, in terrible circumstances no one would ever have imagined. Had we still been married, no matter how bad that marriage was, I would have been met with comforting arms, home-cooked meals, and nightly calls or texts.

I would have been allowed my sorrow, my feelings of shock and disbelief. I would have been treated with respect and care.

Instead, I wandered around the funeral home during the calling while people politely avoided me and tried not to catch my eye. When my daughters and grandchildren fled away from the casket, I was left awkwardly standing alone beside his body. The endless column of people who were still waiting in line to pay their respects halted while they all looked around for the real bereaved.

I didn’t want special attention or favors, no honors. But I didn’t expect to be nothing-ed.

I had written a poem some years earlier when I was struggling with the realization that I needed to leave him. One line said, “What am I, if not your wife?” And here was my answer:

Nothing.

More consideration was shown for the latest floozy he’d taken up with than for the mother of his children, his wife of 35 years. Thankfully, that woman did not attend, but a dreadful poem she’d hand-written was given a place of honor, framed and prominently displayed.

As for me, my daughters let me know I was not to stand up and say the few loving lines I had prepared. My grief had nowhere to go, but theirs had found a target.

Disenfranchised grief. I never knew there was a term for it.

What right did I have to grieve? There was no place for me to be, yet I couldn’t not be there. No place for me to stand, to sit; nowhere to hide.

My daughters finally sat me in the front row at the funeral, alongside them, between my young granddaughters. I held their hands as they sobbed. We sat in a row, as a unit, having no choice but to accept the unimaginable. And some of my daughter’s friends shot accusing glares at me.

“Why is she sitting there?” they muttered as if they were owed some explanation. I would rather have been back in a corner behind a potted palm at that point.

Thirty-five years of my life were wiped away in an instant, in no small part, because my former husband couldn’t control his behavior. And yet, there would be no words of consolation for me, no sympathy cards.

No hugs.

I was, in fact, carefully avoided, at the calling, the service, and the dinner after — the elephant in the room. A pariah. I was just supposed to silently pony up money for the funeral.

I was sad beyond belief and heartbroken, both for my ex and my family, but that sorrow had no place to be. The immediate events surrounding his funeral were not to be the end of it, either.

A few months later, one of my close friends expressed deep surprise when, after he casually asked about my ex, I briefly mentioned my sadness. He brushed it off with a careless shrug of his shoulders.

“Huh,” he said. “I didn’t think you’d care.” And wandered off.

I was shocked speechless at those insensitive words, the lack of common decency. To think it was one thing, to blurt it out so callously was totally another.

But I was not qualified to grieve, so it didn’t matter.

Grief takes many forms. It isn’t just the anguish that someone’s gone, but also sorrow for all of the shared memories that died, too; for the death of what might have been, the words left unspoken.

When you’re together for that long, you make memories no one else shares with you. For many years after, I would think to call him up and ask him about a person we used to know or some detail I couldn’t recall, a line from some sitcom we’d enjoyed.

There was always pain when I remembered I could never do that again. God knows I didn’t want to be married to him anymore, but I didn’t want him to be gone, either. He was still family.

‘Disenfranchised grief’ is the perfect phrase. Grief with nowhere to go.

Thanks for reading. I appreciate you, always. Remember to say the important things.