Gwynn Raimondi, MA

On Grief :: Loss is loss

By

You care so much you feel as though you will bleed to death with the pain of it. 

~J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

For three years I worked/interned/externed as a grief counselor for a local family grief support center.  The clients I worked with were as young as four and as old as in their 70s.  The losses ranged from parent loss to sibling loss to child loss to intimate partner loss.  The kinds of deaths our clients loved ones experienced were cancers and heart attacks, car accidents and random shootings, and all forms of suicide.

We mostly offered groups, for appropriate age ranges and types of loss.  One of our tenets for all the groups is: “We do not compare losses.”  Meaning that grief is grief.  Our person is gone and while the way they exited this life may have been dramatic or mundane, our hearts are broken all the same.

In all the groups I co-facilitated, this was never an issue.  We set the boundary up front and no one ever tried to play the “My grief is better/worse than yours” game.

I’ve seen that game played out in life outside the center though.  Hell, I’ve even played that game.

When we are hurting, when we are in the rawness of our grief, the immediate, and traumatic, impact of it, it can be hard to notice how others may be hurting, may have experienced similar loss, may be grieving right along side you with your loss.

Those early days and weeks and months of grief have us self-focused.  Because our pain is so intense.  And even if we need to function and care for others as we are feeling our own pain, the hurt, the what feels to be all consuming hurt, is ours and through this lens we look at the world.

So, it makes sense in those early days and weeks and months that we may deeply believe that our own pain is greater than another’s.  That no one has ever suffered in this kind of rawness as we are.  The no one could possibly understand what we are experiencing.

And as is often the case with the stories we tell ourselves in our heads, none of this is necessarily true.

It is true that no one has experienced the exact form of grief, in the exact way, that we each have.  We are each individuals, with similar, yet vastly unique experiences.

And.

Grief is part of being human.  Loss is part of our lived experience.

And no matter what the loss is, it is uncomfortable at best, excruciatingly painful at worst.  No matter the loss, grief comes and goes in waves that sometimes we feel we will drown in and others we are able to surf.

Yes, our personal experiences are unique, and they are also universal.

I talk more about this in the 12 minute video below.

This essay is the first in a three part series I have written exploring grief and loss, how it affects us, and how our culture attempts to stifle it. Here are links to the others in the series ::

On Grief :: Loss is Loss (this essay)

On Grief :: The Passage of Time

On Grief :: Holidays, Anniversaries, and Other Triggers (link coming soon)

Grief, trauma and anger

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Each week in the Survivors of Suicide group that I co-facilitate, we have new members. More people whose partners have completed suicide, leaving behind confusion, anger, pain, and of course, grief.

Grief. It is such an uncomfortable emotion. I witness people trying to rush through their grief, trying to stuff it down, trying to push it aside. I am asked over and over when the grief will end.

The truth is, it doesn’t. When someone we love, someone who matters to us, dies or a significant relationship ends, we grieve for the rest of our lives. It isn’t always as raw or overwhelming as it is in the beginning, those early months, that first year. And yet, there can still be moments of overwhelming grief, even years later.

Anger is part of our grief process. Not every time, but more times than not we become furious with the person who died “on us” or who left us. There is no logic to this anger, no reason. It just is. It’s an important part of our grieving. It gives us agency. It protects us from the overwhelm of sadness and pain. It motivates us to do something.

Grief, of course, isn’t the only time we tap into our anger. Our anger rushes forward to both protect and motivate us in a million different ways every day. We know our anger is protecting us from deeper pain when we are focusing that anger directly onto another person, for what they did or didn’t do or say. The anger is whispering to us “I know this hurts too much right now, so let me take care of you.”

Anger gives us motivation to act. It wants us to act. To do. Anger is not a being emotion. It has agency and does not want us sitting in it, stagnant. It wants to flow.

Anger is uncomfortable. It represents the dissonance in us. Our very fibers vibrate when we are angry (ever been so mad you literally shook?). It wants resolution. It demands to be heard.  To be witnessed. For us to take action.

The discomfort of anger, or grief, or sadness or any pain, is something we aren’t so good at allowing. Our culture tells us over and over how we must be happy and comfortable at any cost.

So we stuff. We push aside. We tie down. We ignore. We pursue happiness, ever seeking outside and trying to pretend that the turmoil we feel within does not exist.

This stuffing down can work for awhile. Hell, it can work for a lifetime, quite frankly, at some levels, to some degree. Even so, it causes its own dis-ease and discomfort. We wear a mask and so no one sees us, not even our Self, and we are lonely and distrusting of others. Distrusting because we know we are wearing a mask, because we know we aren’t being honest with others or our Self, so how could anyone else be honest and true?

A few months ago, as I lead a Parenting While Grieving group, I told the two fathers there—one whose wife had died of cancer within the last year, the other whose daughter had died in a bizarre accident a little over a year ago—that their very cores and beings were altered by the deaths of their loved ones. I reminded them that being in this space, this “new normal” is uncomfortable. I also most said, And if I had a magic wand, I would take this discomfort away. I stopped myself, and told them what I almost said and then said, The truth is, if I had a magic wand, I would wave it so that everyone could sit in their discomfort and know they are going to be okay.

This isn’t because I’m a sadist.  I don’t get pleasure in causing others pain.

It is because I firmly believe that the majority of our world’s problems are because we absolutely cannot sit in our discomfort. Because we try to stuff down or medicate or blame our discomfort away. Because we are desperate to fix it. Because we cannot stand the dissonance it is trying to tell us about.

But that dissonance, that discomfort? THAT is what brings about change. THAT is what motivates us to look within. That is what gives us the energy to do different.

In grief we are forced to be different, because generally our grief is because of something that was in many ways out of our control. In anger, we are motivated to do and be different.

When someone says something uncomfortable to us, or even says something uncomfortable in our general vicinity, it is an opportunity for us to become curious as to why it is making us uncomfortable. That discomfort is an invitation to explore our Self, our thoughts, our values. It is a chance to dig into who we are, who we actually are compared to who we want to be, and consciously and intentionally decide if we want to do or be different.

This is not to say that people don’t often project their crap onto us. Many do. AND it is still an opportunity to look within and consciously and intentionally decide if what a person said is theirs or ours. AND especially if there is discomfort on our part, or defensiveness, or anger, it is a chance to really deeply look within and examine what that may be about.

I invite you this week, this month, this year, the rest of your life, to settle into discomfort. To allow it to be. To become curious about it, to try to understand it.

I invite you to allow your grief and anger. To let them motivate you to both look within and to be outwardly different from how you have been before.

I invite you to examine your own defensiveness and wonder where it is coming from, what deeper story about your worth is it tied to, and how you can shift from a place of defense to a place of self-exploration and deeper knowing and empathy.

Will you accept my invitation? Together I know we can do this. xoxo

(Today’s post is a revision to a love letter I sent out in July.  Did you enjoy it? Want to read more? Then I invite you to hop on over and subscribe to my weekly love letters right over here.)