An unimaginable, indescribable loss has taken place. It has inflicted a wound so deep that numbness and excruciating pain are the material of which it is made.
Everyone experiences many losses throughout life, but the death of a loved one is unmatched for its emptiness and profound sadness. Your world stops. You know the exact time your loved one died—or the exact moment you were told. It is marked in your mind. Your world takes on a slowness, a surrealness. It seems strange that the clocks in the world continue when your inner clock does not.
Your life continues, but you are not sure why. A different life appears before you, one in which your loved one will no longer be physically present. No one can give you words to make you feel better; there are none. You will survive, though you may not be sure how or even if you want to.
Your loss and the grief that accompanies it are very personal, different from anyone else’s. Others may share the experience of their losses. They may try to console you in the only way they know. But your loss stands alone in its meaning to you, in its painful uniqueness.
• • •
Brian, in his late fifties, had to have his leg amputated. It was a terrible loss. During rehabilitation sessions he saw another man who had had both legs amputated, and now he thought less of his loss and felt unjustified in feeling bad. He said he suddenly realized there were people worse off than he was. The next day in his rehabilitation session he saw a young man with both legs who just needed a cane, and then he felt his loss more keenly. The two men had a chance to talk after their session about what had brought them to this point. Brian shared that he had lost his leg because of diabetes. The man with a cane told of the car accident that had caused a minor injury to his back and said he needed to regain his strength. Brian, still comparing losses, said, “Well, at least you have two legs.” The man with the cane said, “Yes I do, but I lost my wife in the accident.”
When you compare losses, someone else’s may seem greater or lesser than your own, but all losses are painful. If you lost a husband at seventy, there will be someone who lost a husband at forty-eight. If you lost a parent at twelve, there will be someone who lost their parent at five years old—or at fifteen years. Losses are very personal and comparisons never apply. No loss counts more than another. It is your loss that counts for you. It is your loss that affects you. Your loss is deep and deserves your personal attention without comparison. You are the only one who can survey the magnitude of your loss. No one will ever know the meaning of what was shared, the deepness of the void that shadows your future. You alone know your loss. Only you can fully appreciate the depth of the physical relationship that has ended.
We all play many roles in our lives: spouse, parent, child, family member, friend. You knew your loved one in a way that no one else ever did or ever will. One person’s dying touches many people in many different ways; everyone feels that loss individually. Your task in your own mourning and grieving is to fully recognize your own loss, to see it as only you can. In paying the respect and taking the time it deserves, you bring integrity to the deep loss that is yours.
For many, a strange and unexpected feeling sits amid the loss: a feeling of relief that contrasts with the pervading sadness. It feels out of place, out of step, and is often considered wrong. Why would you feel a sense of relief at the loss of someone so close and so dear?
If you feel relief, it may be because your loved one was suffering and you are grateful it has ended. Watching or even thinking about a loved one’s suffering places a heavy pain on top of the sadness. Of course you wanted her to live long, fully, and well. But that was not an option.
It is her endless suffering you wanted to end, which is why you feel somewhat relieved that she is dead. Hence the confusion: the relief and sadness mix together in a situation that has no resolve. When this occurs, your relief is the recognition that the suffering has ended, the pain is over, the disease no longer lives. Your loved one no longer has that illness, that disease. It has stopped causing her pain.
Your relief may be in proportion to the amount and length of suffering. For example, when President Ronald Reagan died from Alzheimer’s disease, he had been suffering for close to a decade. Nancy, his wife, was deeply saddened and allowed her loss to be viewed by the world. Many people, including some family members, talked about the relief they felt now that his suffering was over. He had seen so many years of pain with no quality of life, and all they could do was watch him decline. At the end of that, anyone would be relieved.
For those who did not experience a long, drawn-out death, however, the task of separating the relief from the loss becomes even more difficult. There is the relief of knowing your loved one is no longer suffering. There is the reality that neither are you. Suffering is a family affair, and everyone endures it together.
One day, John went into the hospital for a simple cardiac procedure. He and his wife, Amanda, were informed, just like everyone else, that something could go wrong. They accepted that, and he turned out to be the one in a thousand who suffered complications. Before Amanda knew what was going on, John was diagnosed with Acute Respiratory Distress Syndrome (ARDS), which is an inflammatory process that results in moderate to severe loss of lung function. She could not believe that this illness existed and that his body was suddenly overcome with respiratory failure and massive infection. The odds were so against this happening. He needed to be resuscitated not once but twice, his temperature reached 107 degrees, and a few days after the surgery he lay in the ICU with little brain function and even less hope for survival.
For the next ten days his wife watched his face covered in tape that held in tubes so that a machine could breathe for him. On the tenth day, he had his final cardiac arrest and did not survive. Amanda was stunned. Just two weeks prior, he had appeared and felt absolutely fine. But she also felt relief that he was not suffering after ten seemingly interminable days.
Her task was to integrate the sadness with the relief, a classic example of mixed emotions. Most of us have experienced mixed emotions in our lives. We think we should have only one emotion, but many conflicting emotions exist in us at the same time. Amanda was right to feel the sorrow and the relief, but how could she give each of these emotions its due?
In grief we often have a deep well of different emotions occurring at the same time, which is what makes grief confusing. We don’t have to choose which emotion is right or wrong. We can feel each emotion as it occurs and understand that relief is not disloyalty but rather a sign of deep love. Even as you are an unwilling character in your loss, you know that your loss will be easier for you to bear than the suffering was for your loved one. That is real love.
Relief plays out in many ways: it may occur for you when you finally get all the medical equipment out of the house. But while you transform the room from a makeshift hospital room to a bedroom once again, the subsequent emptiness will create a new pain. The day you go back to work may feel like a guilty pleasure, as you feel the relief of returning to your work life as you knew it before the tragedy. But then 4:30 P.M. hits and you realize you will be going home to an empty house. Even when you are happy to see your friends again and laugh at their jokes, the relief is mixed with sadness and, maybe, guilt.
It is important to understand that it is not unusual to feel relief, even in the midst of the sadness. This is a normal reaction and not a reason to feel guilty. The relief you feel is the calm after the storm.
We are not accustomed to the emotional upheaval that accompanies a loss. People experience a wide array of emotions after a loss, from not caring to being on edge to feeling angry or sad about everything. We can go from feeling okay to feeling devastated in a minute without warning. We can have mood swings that are hard for anyone around us to comprehend, because even we don’t understand them. One minute we are okay. The next we’re in tears. This is how grief works.
We can touch the pain directly for only so long until we have to back away. We think about our work, get momentarily distracted in something else, process the feelings, and go for more. If we did not go back and forth emotionally, we could never have the strength to find peace in our loss.
Vanessa was returning to the work world a few months after her son died in a car accident. She had been an office manager for years, and when someone offered her the same kind of job, it made sense to take a position doing the same line of work. But very soon, multitasking became multiemotional and multidemanding. After a few days on the job, she knew she had made a mistake, that this kind of work was more than she was prepared to handle.
“I’m so sorry,” she said. “I shouldn’t have taken this job. It is more than I am capable of right now. This is a perfect job for me in about a year, but right now, I need simple work like being a receptionist with a phone and a list of numbers.” Vanessa knew her emotional limits and was brave enough to put her emotional well-being first.
The other extreme would be complete denial with no hope for ever returning to life. That would place us in a constant emotional reenactment of our loss with no chance for learning to live with it in a healthy way. We would see loss and feel it everywhere. The smallest loss would produce the biggest overreactions.
• • •
Helena, an attorney who lost her husband, Hank, after a long struggle with heart problems, thought she was doing fine. Her late husband’s best friends, Chris and Judy, checked in regularly to see how she was doing. When she repeatedly told them she was fine, they knew she was coping in the only way she knew how.
A month following the death, her friends asked her to dinner and wanted her to choose the night.
“I’m flexible,” she said. “My calendar is empty, so you pick a night and I’ll be there.”
They decided to get together on Monday, five days from when they placed the call. But on Monday morning, Chris called to change the date. “We’re having a busy week,” he told Helena. “Is Saturday okay instead?”
Helena was strangely quiet. Then she said, “I’m sorry. Saturday won’t work. Let’s just skip the whole thing. I have to go now.” And she hung up the phone.
It turned out that Helena was devastated by what she considered a betrayal and she refused to answer a string of phone calls from Chris’s wife, Judy. Judy kept leaving messages that said, “What’s up? Did Chris offend you in any way? Why won’t you return my calls?”
Judy even dropped by Helena’s house on Friday after work to make sure Helena was okay, but no one answered the door. When she spotted a neighbor watering her garden, Judy asked her if she’d seen Helena recently.
“I saw her this morning,” the neighbor said. “She was on her way to work and we waved at each other.”
“I’m so worried about her,” Judy confided. “She stopped returning my phone calls after we rescheduled a dinner. Does she seem okay to you?”
Later that evening, the neighbor stopped by to see Helena, who greeted her with a smile. “Your friend Judy was here today. She was concerned about you.”
Helena frowned. “She used to be my friend,” she said.
When Judy called again that night, Helena picked up the phone. “Please tell me what’s going on,” said Judy.
“I can’t believe you would cancel on me at a time like this,” said Helena. “That’s not how friends treat each other. I never want to see you again.”
“Well,” said Judy, “before you throw away our friendship of twenty-three years, you need to know that we never meant to hurt you. You had reassured us that you were completely flexible. When we saw our week getting crazy and we were both exhausted, you gave us permission to do it on any night, so we chose one when we’d have more energy. If we had known you would react like this, we never would have changed it. Please, come out to dinner with us. We miss you and we love you.”
Helena burst into tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I haven’t been myself lately. I guess I had no idea how raw I felt. But I was just putting all my emotional pain and grief into other situations.”
In order to give your emotions a rest, you have to accept things as they are. You have been through a lot. Your emotions are playing out in a new terrain, with emotional lows and occasional highs that you are not prepared or equipped to handle.
The loss is not over and the pain is not gone. You had bad days before any of this happened, so don’t be hard on yourself for having them now. Figure out what rests your emotions and do it without judgment: things like getting lost in movies, TV, music, a change of scenery, a trip away, being outdoors, or just having nothing to do. Find what brings you some solace and lean toward it. Even when we feel we are giving our emotions a rest, it may feel forced and awkward. But you have been in such a heightened state that anything less will feel empty. Your life has been out of balance and will be for some time. It will take time to find a new balance.
People can spend time with old friends or just spend more time with current ones. Support groups may bring new people into your world. All these things will help. Be careful not to take on new relationships with lots of emotions. You may not be ready, and they can often complicate things. Your emotions, just like your body, need to repair. If you can postpone complex or important decisions, do so. If you can’t, ask for help. Invite trustworthy friends and family members to give you guidance.
A year down the road, you may still find things so emotionally draining that you need to change.
• • •
Jerry appreciated keeping his outer world the same after his internal world had been so changed by the loss of his wife. He had no emotional energy to deal with any other kind of change. His job was the same, his home was the same.
In his second year of grieving, everyone at work noticed that he looked more at peace. His boss commented that he looked happier and wondered what was going on.
Jerry said, “Ever since I moved to a new house, I feel better. I could never have done it that first year—I needed the familiarity—but in the second year, every room was an emotional trap for my loss. My house went from being comforting to being a constant emotional reminder of all I had lost. The kitchen became ‘the place where Sara didn’t cook anymore.’ The bedroom became ‘the place Sara didn’t sleep anymore.’ But now that everything is new, Sara lives in my heart and not in the house. At first I wondered if I was not honoring her memory. Then I realized that she was not an emotional drain in life and she wouldn’t want to be one in death.”
When a loved one dies, we are often left with many regrets about all those things we wish we had said, all those things we wish we had done. We may regret what we didn’t do or didn’t say. We keep going back over things we wish we’d said and things we wish we hadn’t. We are all human. There are very few people who can say they don’t have even a small regret. Regrets are part of loss, and you are not alone in the experience of regret.
Life is usually shorter than we hoped, and we are often unprepared for loss. So it is only natural that things will feel unfinished. We often don’t have the time to completely do everything we had hoped to. Very few people feel like they got to do it all, much less do it well. We will always have a dream unfulfilled, a wish not yet granted. Chances are that no matter how much you did for your loved one, how you cared for them and loved them, there will always be something else you could have done. The “more” that we long for and crave is always there and always changing. If you do it, whatever it may be for you, something else will take its place.
Holly’s only regret when she was ill was that she would not live to see her daughter grow up. She bargained with God by saying, “God, please let me have her till she is in kindergarten, then she will be okay and I will want nothing more.”
Holly was granted the gift of more time. At her daughter’s kindergarten graduation, she looked at her daughter and said, “Please, God, just till she is ten years old. She needs a mommy a little longer.”
Holly died when her daughter was eleven, even though she had subsequently asked God to wait till her daughter was a teenager. Her loved ones will always regret that Holly didn’t get “more.”
There will always be regrets. You could have watched that TV show they loved. You could have said “I love you” one more time. You could have visited an extra time.
We all know intellectually that we don’t have forever. We also know we can’t do it all. But intellect does not inform matters of the heart. Regrets are of the heart, the yearning for more and the chance to always do it better. Regrets will always belong to the past. And death has a cruel way of giving regrets more attention than they deserve.
The illusion of infinite time clouds our understanding of the preciousness of one another. That value grows in death as we realize all that was lost. At the funeral, your husband’s childhood friend speaks of their years together as kids, and you think, “I always meant to ask what it was like growing up in Chicago.” You loved her meat loaf, but what was the recipe? Maybe you heard a story your loved one told over and over again at countless dinners and parties, and now you realize you have questions about that story but no one is here to answer them. Instead of answers, you are left with regrets.
Alexander was tired of living in an apartment; he wanted to buy a home with his wife, Laura. Laura didn’t just want a home, she fantasized and she dreamed of one as she went on and on about the way she would decorate it and how the backyard would look. She even talked about how people would feel when they came in her home: the warmth and the colors that would help people relax. In fact, she would happily have bought the house right away, even if they found something they couldn’t afford.
Alexander, however, was the practical one. “Not yet,” he’d say. “Not till we’re making three times a year more than the house payment would be.” His worst childhood memory was of his father and mother worrying about not having enough money for their bills.
Soon, Laura found out she had advanced stomach cancer and had only months to live. The next months were spent in hospitals and with doctors, and before Alexander knew it, she was gone. The dream house had never been discussed further because they had become so consumed with her illness. It was only after her death that he was hit with intense regret about not getting a house.
“What was the big deal?” he thought. “We could have managed. Even if she had died in her dream house, I could have sold it later. At least her dreams would have come true.”
Alexander has regrets and information now that he didn’t have then. How could he have known they didn’t have forty years to realize their dream house and so much more? But in his regrets, emotions won over details and realities.
Dreams are often the regrets of tomorrow, and all that we hope for may not always be ours to have.
Then there are the small things. Josh always sang the same song over and over again. One day his wife gave him clear directions never to sing that song again without a shower door at his side and water falling on his face. But after his death, she’d have given anything to hear that stupid song and deeply regretted she had put a stop to the song in her husband’s heart.
Besides how we lived, there is the question of how we died. And the regret is, did we have to die? What if we had done it differently, since the modern medical system is filled with choices—Eastern medicine vs. Western, aggressive treatment vs. more conservative. Did we see the doctor at the first sign of trouble, or did we assume it was nothing and wait?
No matter which choice you made, since the outcome now has been loss, you may regret not choosing whatever the other option was. We have seen people choose every possible way to deal with their illness and can tell you that most of the options that keep people up at night regretting would not have made a difference in the outcome. Knowing this is not an easy statement to hear, especially with so many books discussing cures, and commercials for hospitals and cancer treatments. But there is a difference between curable and incurable diseases, and it can provide an antidote for regrets. The truth is that in most cases, doing things differently may have changed the process but would not have prevented the death.
Do your best to make peace with as many regrets as possible. It would be unrealistic to have done everything in life. It would also be just as unrealistic to have been perfect and have no regrets. Forgive yourself. Isn’t it true that if you could have made better choices, you would have? You did the best you could at that time of your life.
Sometimes grief can hold healing not only for the loss but for you as a person. If you have the courage to follow your feelings to their origin, they may be simple grief. But they may also go back to a deeper feeling. Regrets will be a part of grief, but if you follow the thread to its core, you may find a sense of wrongness that has been with you your whole life. This grief may provide the opportunity for an even greater healing.
In terms of regrets around our loved one who died, if there are things you wish you’d said, know that you can still say them in your heart to your loved one. It’s never too late to say, “I’m sorry. Forgive me and I forgive you. I love you and I thank you.”
After that, what else is there to regret?
Tears are one of the many ways we release our sadness, one of our many wondrous built-in healing mechanisms. Unfortunately, too often we try to stop this necessary and primal release of our emotions. In grief we often have only two main thoughts about crying. The first is the overwhelming thought of sadness that hits us. The second is, “I must stop crying.” After many people begin to cry they quickly move to stop this natural phenomenon.
Melinda was the youngest to join her town’s prestigious accounting firm. She married John, one of the division managers, and while he was the manager at work, she was the decision maker at home. John’s background was in human resources; he knew how to manage people and their problems. Melinda was a numbers person. She loved accounting. She liked the logic that two plus two always equals four.
After twenty years of marriage, John found out he had advanced heart disease, which made no sense to Melinda, because neither of them smoked, both ate well, and both exercised frequently. This was not supposed to be happening, and yet it was. Melinda took on John’s health like a project. She researched treatments on the Internet and went to every lecture she could find. When John’s health deteriorated even more, Melinda found him crying. She said, “John, stop it. Tears won’t do us any good.”
John tenderly said, “We have done all we could, and it is almost over, and—”
She interrupted him. “But it isn’t over. There’s always more to do. I don’t want us to miss any treatment possibilities.”
John put his hand on hers and said, “Then please don’t miss us saying good-bye.”
She sat down on the bed with him, holding back tears. John said, “Honey, it’s okay to cry. Look at me. Even I’m crying.”
“You don’t understand,” she said. “If I started, I would never stop.” With that said, Melinda continued to hold back her tears.
People like Melinda avoid crying for fear that they might cry forever. But of course you will stop crying, even if you don’t believe you will. The worst thing you can do is to stop short of really letting it out. Uncried tears have a way of filling the well of sadness even more deeply. If you have a half hour of crying to do, don’t stop at twenty minutes. Let yourself cry it all out. It will stop on its own. If you cry till your last tear, you will feel released.
One night, ten years to the day after John died, Melinda lost her car keys. She had a car full of groceries and it was pouring rain. She knew she had them minutes earlier but they were nowhere to be found. She checked her purse repeatedly and lifted every bag of groceries and checked the floor. After a frustrating search, she sat down in the car. She watched the rain helplessly through the windows. She noticed the raindrops hit the window, grow, and roll down the windshield, and she began to cry. She cried until a friend picked her up. Then at home she cried again until nightfall. She cried the rest of the weekend. Her face melted with the thousands of tears she cried. She looked back on those ten years and said she felt like one of those large water towers you see outside of small towns: large, high, unreachable, and full of water.
Melinda still cries from time to time, but she now knows how illogical it was to think, “If I start, the tears will never end.” Of course they end. It’s the feelings underneath that never end, nor would you want them to.
We live in a society that views tears as a weakness and a face of stone as strength. Whether you cry or not may have more to do with how you were raised than with the nature of your loss. Some of us were raised with permission to cry and others were not. For some, crying privately may be okay and crying publicly is unacceptable. Whatever you were taught, the loss of a loved one can tip the scales and bring up the tears you never thought you could cry.
At times, you may start to cry as if for no reason at all. It may seem it just comes out of the blue, because you are not even consciously thinking about your loss. Unexpected tears remind you that the loss is always there. People often find they are reminded unexpectedly of a loved one and start crying in a situation they were not prepared to handle. For example, you’re at work and an associate you haven’t seen in a year says innocently enough, “What’s new?” They have no idea what you’ve been through, but you are suddenly flooded with emotions. There is nothing to do except collect yourself as best you can at work and explain the only thing that really is new.
Hospice nurse Marion had a rule that whenever she cared for a patient for more than four months, she would attend their funeral if invited. One day, Marion’s supervisor, Shelley, accompanied her to the funeral of a sweet, kind woman whom they’d cared for together during the last six months. But Shelley became concerned when she saw Marion sobbing her heart out at the funeral. She knew that Marion was scheduled to see a few more patients that day, and she feared her employee would not be ready.
As they walked to their cars, Marion’s tears subsided and Shelley asked, “Are you okay to see patients today?”
“Of course,” she said with a smile, and she drove off.
At the end of the day, Shelley met with Marion to check on her. She told her she was concerned at how upset she’d seemed earlier and how hard she had cried over her deceased patient.
Marion took Shelley’s hand and said, “The only way I’ve learned to survive this work over the last twenty years is to cry every tear I have for anyone I care about. I walked away from that funeral with no residue, just some fond memories. Some nurses and families hold in bits of sadness, like it’s not enough for a real big cry.”
Marion knew the importance of taking the pain inside and releasing it outside. Then she was done when her sadness was fully expressed. Unexpressed tears do not go away; their sadness resides in our bodies and souls. Tears can often be seen as dramatic, too emotional, or a sign of weakness. But in truth, they are an outward expression of inner pain.
Others have their own reactions to seeing someone crying. For those around the person crying, people may feel grateful the person is able to cry. Or they may feel uncomfortable, thinking, “If they cry, I might.” Or “If Cindy, who never cries at anything, is crying, things must really be bad.” These days, even men are learning it is okay to cry. After 9/11 we were flooded with images of men crying, even firefighters. It helped us to view crying not as a sign of weakness but rather as an expression of deep sorrow.
Norman, a pilot, lost his only brother in the Vietnam War. He felt he needed to show his inner strength in the army base and also in his inner base at the time. Years later, 9/11 struck him deeply and personally. Besides his feelings of being a part of the country to which it had happened, it brought up all his feelings for his brother. He looked at all the men crying and thought, “I would have cried if I’d known I could.” He then asked himself a rhetorical question: “So what if I had cried?” And cry he did.
Our perception about crying in public is cultural. In some places, not crying is a sign of dignity, whereas in other cultures, not crying for the deceased is considered a sign of dishonor.
A mother survived two of her three children. When the first one, a son, died, she was so overcome by grief she fell on the casket and cried out loud. Her husband gently pulled her to her feet and the funeral continued.
When her second child died, her own mother took her grieving daughter aside before the funeral and said, “Don’t make a scene like you did last time. The tears will ruin your makeup. Do you have any idea how your face looked the last time with mascara running down your chin?”
She faced her mother and said, calmly, “Do you have any idea what will be ruined if I don’t cry?”
Tears are a symbol of life, a part of who we are and what we feel. They live in us and through us. They represent us and reside in our pain. This symbol and representation of sadness can appear anytime. Since it is so tied to life itself, we are often surprised when laughter breaks spontaneously through tears.
The humanity we witness often causes us to laugh at ourselves, but never mistake laughing through tears as a reason to feel guilty. It is the life we have, mixed with the sadness we feel. It is a fail-safe mechanism we have for managing the pain.
In grief groups we often have a rule: “Everyone has to grab their own tissues.” Sometimes when someone starts to cry, everyone grabs the tissue box and shoves tissues at them. While this may be an act of comfort, it often sends the message “hurry and stop crying.” Also, if we go into the role of caretaker, we avoid our own emotions.
The truth is that tears are a symbol of life and can be trusted. One woman shared how she was crying on the phone to her parents after she lost her husband. When her mother heard her sobs, she said, “We should get off the phone now.” Luckily, her father jumped in and said, “No. I’m staying on the line even though she’s crying.”
Acceptance of death is part of the work that must be done if we are to grieve fully. If crying is part of our outer culture or inner sadness and we have tears to cry, then we should use this wonderful gift of healing without hesitation.
Long periods of denial are worse than crying. Crying is much better, but you have to cry your own tears because no one can do it for you. If you see someone else crying and you cry, it is triggering some sadness you feel inside. Sometimes you’d rather cry for any situation but your own, but regardless of your preferences, you are always crying for yourself.
A woman in her early forties lay in her hospital bed with her husband by her side. They both looked up as the hospital chaplain entered the room. They talked for a while about her cancer and the possible treatments. Since her cancer was advanced, she had very few treatments to choose from. She looked at her husband and then over at the chaplain and said in a very matter-of-fact tone, “Last night I saw angels. I never saw angels before.”
The chaplain asked, “What were they like?”
“Oh, they were so beautiful,” she said, with sparkling eyes. She looked at her husband, who did not look reassured by her vision. “Don’t worry,” she said, “they’ll be there for you when the time comes. They will comfort you.”
The chaplain ran into her physician outside the room and asked how she was doing medically. Her physician discussed her limited options but said there was an experimental treatment that might give her some additional time. When the doctor asked the chaplain how his visit went, the man replied, “She saw angels.”
The doctor looked down. “That’s never a good sign,” he told the chaplain.
“Yes,” the chaplain said, “not medically. But spiritually, it’s perfect.”
When the woman died, those words “They will comfort you” were like a cushion for her husband’s grief. He confided in a close friend, “I can’t describe it and I don’t want people to think I am crazy, but I can feel it. The moment she died, I knew she was all right, and I have felt watched over ever since that moment.”
Some people have strong beliefs in angels, guardian angels, while others hope they exist. We speak of them in many forms in our culture: the angel of death, angels we pray to for help and comfort. Sometimes they are just a part of our God and the heavens. We ask them to be gentle as they take our loved one. We ask them to watch over us. We ask them to meet our loved ones on the other side. Many times we just ask for their help.
It is unnecessary to debate the reality of angels. They are beyond an entity that can be proved or disproved. After a loved one’s death, we often ponder the idea of them for the first time in our life. They give us hope and they comfort us. They are part of a religious and spiritual belief system that many hold dear. As much as people like to think of angels as New Age, interpretations of them and references to them go back to the book of Genesis. As God describes his creations, he uses the word “I.” Then at one point he says “we.” Many interpret this to mean angels of God were there before creation.
Many believe you cannot die alone, that angels are always present. Young children often refer to angels as their playmates. They have been called everything from guides to spooks, because they can be scary if you aren’t expecting them. It is not important what label we give them, but it is important to understand that many cultures believe that from the moment of birth to the end of physical existence, we are in the presence of angels who are there to help us with our last breath. They will wait till the end of our physical existence and help us transition to our purely spiritual existence. They will be there for those we leave behind. And just as you cannot die alone, you cannot grieve alone.
While many think of angels as visions of cherubs from heaven, they also appear in physical form through us and in us. Those dying and those who have experienced a deep grief will talk about how a friend was “an angel” for coming over at just the right moment.
Two sisters who were not close through the years were drawn together by the loss of one of their husbands. The other sister told her grief-stricken sibling, “We would love for you to move in with us for a while.”
The widow told friends years later, “I didn’t stay long, but when she gave me a place in the world when I felt so lost, I realized my sister was truly an angel.”
We need to know that as the physical form of our loved one leaves, something beyond them lingers and comforts us, something beyond our ability to describe or substantiate. Grieving people sometimes say, “In my darkest days, I must have been carried by angels.” They may feel it was their loved one still comforting them from a world beyond their sight. Others think angels were sent by God to reassure them that they were not alone.
Your loved one still exists. On the long road you now walk alone, you have unseen companions.
In our work with the grieving, people are very grateful for help. We, like many others, have both felt awkward at times when someone talks about something we said in an exchange about grief and says it “changed” his or her life. Our awkwardness comes from our not remembering those life-changing moments. Whenever anyone does a pure and angelic deed for others, that person is usually unaware of it.
In the classic Frank Capra movie It’s a Wonderful Life, an angel shows a man how much his simple yet kind deeds have done for others and what a tragedy it would be if he had never been born. The subplot of the movie concerns the angel’s getting his wings for helping Jimmy Stewart’s character. But the real story is that the man had never been aware of how the moments of his life had truly been angelic to others. We all have angelic moments that we give to each other. They appear as simple acts of kindness, which may seem not to matter that much, but they save lives by lifting others from sadness.
While angels watch us, we are capable of being each other’s angels. In deep grief we may wonder, “Where are my angels?” while we miss all the angelic people around us. We may not be seeing or feeling all the love they bring. We may not understand that they are indeed our angels when a friend or even a perfect stranger says just the right thing at the right time.
Elliot was enjoying golfing in his retirement. One day he had a heart attack on the green and died. His wife, Connie, was devastated that her beloved husband died without her in the emptiness of a golf course. “I just wish I knew he was okay when he died. I knew he loved golf, but I wonder how he would feel about the green as a place to die.”
Eleven months later Connie was overwhelmed with the task of doing her taxes. She picked up the phone and called the tax person from her husband’s address book. Before she could go into an explanation of her husband’s death, the tax person told her, “Your husband said you are so good with money, one day you will take over the finances.”
“He said that about me?” she asked.
“Yes, he said, ‘One day you will get a call that my wife is going to do the taxes this year and I will be in golf heaven.’ ”
Not sure if her accountant was consoling her, she asked, “What do you mean by ‘golf heaven’?”
The puzzled accountant replied, “I guess it means he loved to golf, you know, like going to heaven.” He continued, “Let me guess, he is off golfing now?”
She broke the news to her accountant that he had died. The man quickly apologized for the conversation, but Connie told him it was fine. She felt in a strange way that this conversation was a message from her husband that he was okay with his death. Filled with a sense of well-being and self-confidence, Connie took a deep breath and did her taxes. She not only felt that this accountant she had never met was an angel in disguise, but she also felt encouraged by her late husband.
The question ultimately may be, “What does an angel look like?” The answer is different for everyone, since we all grieve differently and are comforted differently. For some, a vision of angels will let us know that we will survive. Or we hear a voice through our sadness that reassures us. It may be the loved ones who gather to comfort us. As in Connie’s case the angel may even be a stranger.
If you are expecting to see the movie version of an angel with wings, you will be disappointed. But if you look closer through your grief at the moments of your life, you may see moments that you know for sure were angelic in nature.
Angels are the extraordinary coming through the ordinary. We need them more than ever in grief, and they always come to help.
Dreams are a natural part of sleep. They embody our hopes, our worst fears, and everything in between. After a loss, it is not unusual to dream that your loved one is still alive. After her husband died, a woman dreamed there was a knock on the door to tell her there had been a mistake at the hospital. Someone else had died; it was a terrible mistake and her husband was alive, recovering, and on his way home.
In the next moment of her dream, her husband was stepping out of the front seat of an ambulance with sirens blaring as if to herald the enormity of the mistake made. He walked toward her looking healthy and whole. She was overjoyed as she looked into his eyes while the sirens continued to blare—until the sirens became the sound of her alarm clock.
Dreams often make promises they can’t keep, a trick of our psyche that brings with it a fleeting feeling of reconnection. Many people say that regardless of the outcome of the dream, they are grateful for even a few more moments with a loved one.
Dreams can provide information about what is really going on inside us. Often people will have dreams in which they are overcome by a sense of overwhelm. A man who lost his wife said that in his dream, he was at the gym, where someone kept piling more and more weights for him to lift. “Too much, too fast,” he yelled out loud as he awakened.
Our dreams can demonstrate the inevitable lack of control we feel when we are grieving. One woman who lost her sister dreamed of being caught in a storm with no way out. That one was easy to interpret, but some dreams are more difficult to read.
Dreams may serve many purposes, including a distraction from pain or a demonstration of the soul grappling with reality. Regardless of their meaning, dreams help us deal with incomprehensible feelings while we sleep, an aid to the grief process, as the unconscious mind cannot distinguish between a wish and reality. Perhaps you are aware of illogical dreams in which two completely opposite realities exist side by side. For instance, you can be very angry in a dream that your loved one has died. At the same time you can be discussing it with them as they appear fully alive in the dream, an illogical and unthinkable experience in our waking state.
After a loss, the need to feel that our loved ones still exist somehow, somewhere, can be very important. Dreams are a very private way to find some reassurance when our world of logic can offer us none. We may not realize how much we work out psychologically in our dream state. Consider the fact that all of us dream every night, but only a small percentage of us are aware of our dreams after we awaken. Dreams can become a meeting place between the world of the living and the realm of the deceased.
Before the loss, people agree that most dreams are hard to understand because their messages are not clear. There are many symbols to be interpreted, and we are left wondering about the fragmented movie we saw in our mind. After a loss, however, dreams often change. Messages are usually much more to the point and contain signs of reassurances, continued existence, and emotional support. Even when the message is not clear, the person in grief awakens from dreams of loved ones feeling grateful. Even if their visit occurred only in the dream world, it still provides a respite from the current world of pain and loss.
Our dreams show us that our loved one is not in essence the sick person to whom we tearfully said good-bye in the hospital. Neither is he or she the body we saw at the funeral home. Our loved one is healthy and intact, the person we knew and now long for. In some cases, dream visitations bring frustration when we can’t control them. Some want to dream and cannot. They suffer as they long for the experience of dreaming of a loved one. Some may not dream at all; others may dream frequently and yet there is no deceased loved one in their dreams. It can seem even emptier with a loved one absent from life and from dreams. Some people have reported that by thinking of a loved one before bed or flipping through a photo album, they can increase the chances of a loved one’s appearance. Dreams can be elusive, and you can’t request a dream of your loved one and be sure it will happen. And when it does happen, you can’t control the content or the duration of the dream or force it to return during dreamless periods. Even so, some people report searching for dreams to return, just as others find themselves in crowds searching for a loved one.
Even if dreams of loss truthfully reflect the circumstances around loss, they rarely follow the actual events. A long struggle may produce a dream about finding your way through the darkness in the forest to get to your loved one. A violent death from a car accident may affect your dreams by showing you a loved one sitting in the car, alive and with friends, while the interior of the car is made from casket fabric.
When people dream of a loved one, they often report feeling a sense of peace afterward, a reassurance beyond words. Some have pangs of pain at first waking when they realize it was only a dream, but eventually, the dreams will begin to subside and become less frequent. While they are still happening, they often represent a form of communication, reassurance, and emotional support from seeing the one person we desire the most.
The dream vision of a loved one can also represent unfinished business, the chance to complete something that was suddenly severed.
Dreams offer us the opportunity to say good-bye and to finish business.
They also allow us to give and receive permission for a loved one, and us, to find peace.
Joyce was walking down Market Street in San Francisco about three months after her close friend Michael had died. She was surprised when she spotted a man she thought could easily have been Michael, with the same hair and body type. Even his walk was the same.
She watched him for a few moments and then gave in to an irrepressible urge to follow him. As she walked behind him, she kept imagining running up to him as she longed for the familiar face she missed so much. But she deliberately stayed a distance behind, realizing she didn’t want to catch up to him and ruin the illusion. The possibility, no matter how far-fetched, that he was alive and was walking a few feet in front of her was comforting enough. When she eventually let him go, she was uplifted by her experience and realized she had undergone a “visual haunting.”
There are many types of hauntings, such as sounds you hear, people you see, words that echo, and even the physical sensation of being touched. You can be haunted by an event in the present or the past, or by something you wish would happen in the future. Whether they are comforting or disturbing, hauntings are a part of loss that needs attention.
To feel loss is to feel a sorrow beyond lifting. A haunting is often a recurrence of the trauma of that loss, such as a vision you cannot get out of your head. Most people are haunted by something or someone. You may be tormented by a scene you wish you hadn’t witnessed, like a loved one with tubes sticking out of everywhere, the smell of the hospital room, or the pained expression on your loved one’s face. Maybe you can’t shake the way she looked when she was diagnosed. Or when she was dying. Or after she died.
Whatever it is, the loved one is gone but the visions remain. Often, though, hauntings are helpful, as they can provide motivation to do whatever it takes to get the vision out of your mind and get you back into the world. You can talk about the visions or draw pictures of them. Art therapy can help people give physical form to their visions as these move from mind to canvas. Whatever your vision may be, find a way to get it out. Try to externalize it. Talk about it. Write a letter.
Hauntings can also be emotional. Many people are relentlessly haunted by two regretful phrases: “if only . . .” and “what if . . .” What if they’d acted faster . . . ? If only they’d had more time . . . But these regrets are part of an emotional haunting we must allow to pass before we can accept the loss.
For some, the haunting is a feeling in the room, a presence that seems like a loved one hovering, a beloved soul lingering. The truth is that such feelings and sensations are beyond explanation. We simply need to acknowledge that the feelings are real, and if the presence feels unsettling, there is some unfinished business at hand. A mother in despair will suddenly report she felt a small hand on hers. A wife going for her first job interview after her husband’s death will say she felt her husband give her a sweet push forward to open the door.
In many cases, a sudden voice calling a loved one’s name tenderly has soothed a grieving person in the night. Maybe the voice tells you, “I still exist. I am not gone. I will love you forever.” Or it may ask for forgiveness or accept it from you.
Hauntings may be signs that you will be okay, or more specifically that it is okay to live again, to find happiness again, and even to find love again. A woman once spoke about feeling haunted whenever she smelled fresh grass being cut. She had hired a neighborhood teenager to do the job when her husband died, so the task was handled, but no one could eliminate the lingering scent that invaded her world.
It is important to remember that hauntings after the death of a loved one are normal and common. They often bring important messages from the psyche that arise from our inner world of grief. They may even bring fear with them, but they usually are not dangerous. Among the myriad of feelings connected with grief, hauntings contain valuable clues, threads to be followed to their source. They represent some unfinished business in some cases and offer great comfort in others.
After four-year-old Robbie’s grandfather died, his father did his best to console Robbie. Late one evening after dinner, his father heard the young boy talking in his room. When he went to see what was going on, he found Robbie standing there smiling to himself.
“What are you doing?” his father asked.
“Talking to Grandpa,” Robbie answered.
His father gave him a hug and said, “I miss him too,” assuming that his four-year-old was dealing with the effects of loss. “But he’s in heaven now.”
“Not yet,” Robbie corrected his dad. “He was just here and he told me how much he misses me. Oh yeah, he told me to tell you he’s okay and the cancer is gone.”
Whether or not hauntings are physical realities is irrelevant to the grief process. Anything that comforts or guides you in your grief work is naturally valuable.
To spend time questioning the experience is to miss the point . . . and perhaps the gift.
In our lives we play many roles. We are the wife, husband, child, and parent. We are also the bill payer, gardener, organizer, mess maker, student, teacher, cook, compliment giver, criticizer, and confidante. We may be the repair person, movie partner, travel companion, clothes chooser, car repairman, and on and on.
When a loved one dies, all the roles they fulfilled are left open. Some we consciously or unconsciously take on ourselves. For other roles, we consciously or unconsciously assign them to someone else, or someone may take them on. Still other roles may be left unfilled.
Michael and his wife, Melissa, owned a small graphic design firm. He was the designer and she managed the finances, ran the office, and made the appointments. When Melissa was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, they had no idea how quickly the cancer would spread and take her life. One month after she died, a phone call came from the bank. His account was overdrawn and they had returned five checks.
Michael realized that while his wife had been ill, he had not sent out any invoices for the last three months. As a result, no one had paid him and there was no money in the account. He completely broke down in tears. “The cancer happened so fast,” he recalled, “she didn’t have time to teach me how to do this. She took care of everything since we started this business, and I don’t know what to do.”
Michael realized he had not only lost his wife of twenty-two years but he had also lost the vital role she had played in their world. He tried to do some of what she had done, but stopped in frustration, knowing it wasn’t his area of expertise. He tried to hire someone to help but could never find “anyone good.” And then, on some level, the idea of having anyone take over his wife’s role felt uncomfortable for him and almost a betrayal.
After the bank called, however, he clearly needed some assistance if he intended on keeping his business running. Michael did not want to hire anyone—he wanted Melissa back. Nevertheless, he recognized that the tasks she had done previously had to be done by someone else. He compromised, realizing that having a bookkeeper come to the office would not work for him. Instead, he took his information to an accounting agency down the street. Now he had reassigned Melissa’s much-needed role in an impersonal way that he could bear.
We often don’t realize the enormity of the roles that people play in our lives. Eleanor and Cynthia, friends for thirty years, had been through everything together. Both had even lost their husbands within two years of each other.
Now Eleanor and Cynthia were in their late sixties. For the past ten years they had became each other’s companions, neither of them having any interest in marrying again. Cynthia died first, leaving Eleanor more alone in the world than ever. It had always felt as if they were in this together, and after Cynthia died, Eleanor began to realize the many roles that her dear friend had played in her life.
Now she went to movies alone and often had dinner alone. When the woman at the dry cleaner’s asked Eleanor where she was going on vacation this year, it hit her that not only was her companion gone, Cynthia would have had the trip planned and booked by now. Every year when the holidays came Cynthia would arrange for both of them to volunteer to wrap presents and deliver them to foster homes. Eleanor was well into the holidays when she felt her friend’s loud absence. She was literally broadsided by the fact that she hadn’t arranged any volunteering and didn’t even know the name of the agency that Cynthia had used.
In that first year, she recognized all the roles Cynthia had played in her life—friend, movie partner, companion, travel planner, holiday organizer. Eleanor had a sad appreciation for all that she had lost. After a few years, she knew that she would not find another Cynthia, but she became more involved in a large church, which filled many of the empty spaces. With different groups in the church, she traveled once a year and she participated in many volunteer activities. In the end, no one person could fill all the roles that Cynthia had played in Eleanor’s life. It took an entire church community.
Often, we take on our loved one’s roles without conscious awareness. Charlotte was a studious type. She taught school and spent most of her free time reading. Her husband, Sam, had been a stand-up comedian with the unique gift of seeing the humor in any situation and making others laugh. He was the ultimate jokester, with several stories always ready to tell, making Charlotte laugh every day. When he died of heart failure, Charlotte found her world suddenly without humor.
Six months later when her daughters were having lunch with her in a Chinese restaurant, Charlotte suddenly said, “Two guys walk into a bar . . .”
The two daughters stared at each other in shock. They had never heard their mother tell a joke during the fifty-one years of her marriage. It seemed that humor was such a big part of Charlotte’s life, her husband’s demise had left a large gap. All those jokes that had lit up her life were gone, replaced with a heaviness. Her life felt out of balance, but to whom could she reassign the role of humorist? Without any conscious decision on her part, she became what she missed as she took on the role herself.
When you sit with the dying and their family, the loved ones will often say that a part of them is dying too. That is true, but equally true is that a part of the one who died lives on in us. This was the case with Charlotte and Sam. To this day, she continues to tells Sam’s jokes . . . and she tells them very well.
• • •
We often carry a great deal of knowledge, most of which dies with us, but not all. We are always teaching. When a writing group lost two members in two years, they often talked about how the knowledge that the two writers had was now a part of the group and made them better writers. In honor and memory of them, the two members were not replaced, and the group feels that in a certain way they are still keeping their friends alive.
Our loved ones play so many parts in our lives. Besides the obvious ones of family and friends, their individual style of playing certain roles is lost. Maybe he was the disciplinarian parent and you were the more lenient one. Maybe she was the decisive one and you evaluated things for a while. Whether tangible or vague, there are many roles that can be missed.
At a recent memorial service a minister told the congregation, “You have not lost all of the things that you loved most about your loved one. They are in you. You can carry them with you for the rest of your life.”
Then he issued a challenge to the congregation. “All of you gathered here,” he said, “are friends of the widow. While all the best parts of him live on in her, many of the physical roles and tasks that her husband played are now left undone. Don’t call and ask what you can do. Just do it. Don’t go to her house this afternoon, stay for an hour, and think you’ve done your part. Think about how you can help her during the next year. Play a role in her grief. That will be the greatest gift you can give her.”
When your loved one became sick, there were medical visits, case histories, and physical tests. Then they found the lump and your world immediately began to change.
Now you sit alone remembering the story of the loss. You may find yourself retelling the story to friends and family. Immediately following the loss, everyone wants to know how it happened. You tell your tale through your sadness and tears. You talk about it after the funeral. When friends come to visit, you discuss the parts of the story you continue to grapple with, like “I didn’t see it coming,” or “They told us she was sick, but none of us realized just how sick she was.”
As time passes, however, you may see others grow weary of hearing the story, although you are not yet tired of telling it. You may not consciously notice this, but when you encounter people who haven’t heard it you are grateful to have their ear.
Telling the story is part of the healing of a traumatic event, no different from the trauma of large-scale disaster. In your world it was a large-scale disaster, most likely the biggest you have ever experienced.
While you try to comprehend and make sense of something incomprehensible and your heart feels the pain of loss, your mind lags behind, trying to integrate something new into your psyche. It is something that moved too fast for your mind to understand. The pain is in your heart, while your mind lingers in the facts of the story, reenacting and recalling the scene of the crime against your heart. Your heart and mind are joined in one state, pain remembering pain.
Telling the story helps to dissipate the pain. Telling your story often and in detail is primal to the grieving process. You must get it out. Grief must be witnessed to be healed. Grief shared is grief abated. Support and bereavement groups are important, not only because they allow you to be with others who have experienced loss, but because they provide another forum for talking about the devastating events that befell your world. Tell your tale, because it reinforces that your loss mattered.
You are the detective, searching out things to help you understand how to put the puzzle together. In telling the story, you open up your confusion as you cover terrain that needs exploring. But there is something about taking the inner thoughts of your mind and speaking them out loud that helps put things in order. It can be the temporary scaffolding that holds up the rocked structure of your world. Telling the story helps to re-create and rebuild structure.
You will find the story changing over time; not necessarily what happened, but what part you focus on. Telling the story may also offer the opportunity for important feedback or information, as the listener may have missing pieces of the puzzle or insight you previously lacked.
Brandy’s grief after her mother died was a mixture of sorrow and relief. She was relieved when they’d placed her on a respirator, ending her struggle to breathe, but Brandy faced some irreversible decisions about life support. Her mother unfortunately had not given out any advance directives concerning her critical condition with little hope of surviving. Even though the doctors found little brain activity after her mother’s stroke, it was a tough reality for Brandy. But after three weeks in the ICU with no improvement, Brandy decided the artificial intervention was keeping a body alive, but that body was not her mother.
Six months later her family had grown tired of hearing her tale over and over again. They would listen to her telling the story to yet another person and they wished she would move on. One day, she and her husband were in the mall when Brandy ran into her mother’s coworker from a decade prior. Her husband secretly wished she would not go into the story. Perhaps this person did not want to hear it.
Brandy basically gave her the headlines and the coworker said, “My father was in his late seventies when he got terminal kidney disease. When he was bed-bound with no quality of life, your mother said to me, ‘I hope I never end up stuck on a machine.’ I’m glad she died that way.”
That was exactly what Brandy needed to hear. She now knew she had done what her mother would have wanted. She also knew that if she hadn’t told her story over and over, she would have missed this crucial insight.
There are many instances where, if the person had gone to the doctor sooner, it might have made a difference. However, there are many more faulty assumptions that if the person had seen a doctor sooner they could have corrected his or her death, as if the death were a mistake. As our lives need validation, so do our deaths. The stories we tell give meaning to the fact that our loved one died, which is why, in American Indian cultures, stories are given the highest priority. In fact, the function of the elderly is to tell the stories of the lives and deaths of the ancestors, the stories that keep their history alive.
In days long gone, elders sat in a circle, telling the stories to the young. These stories held enormous value. Today, in our “shut up, get over it, and move on” mentality, our society misses so much, it’s no wonder we are a generation that longs to tell our stories.
In working with the dying and those in grief, we often have requests from the media to talk to someone who is dying or to their family after the loss. Initially we both felt awkward about asking people to tell us what happened, but we rarely encountered a “no.” People want to tell their stories; they want their lives to matter and their griefs to be heard. Many are amazed by seeing people after a tragedy or loss talk on TV about what happened.
The ways we now have in our society to share our loss become fewer as we discount grief and loss. But ultimately we learn that not telling the story and holding it back also takes an enormous amount of energy. Saying we are fine to a good friend can feel just horrible afterward. Telling our story is primal, and not telling it can be unnatural.
Our stories contain an enormous amount of pain, sometimes too much for one person to handle. In sharing our story, we dissipate the pain little by little, giving a small drop to those we meet to disperse it along the way. Our stories also contain lessons. Mildred would tell the stories of her husband’s and her parents’ dying at every family event. One might imagine her sharing would be a morbid event, but she wove in important parts of who her husband was. Her tales were always filled with lessons of kindness and honesty.
Sometimes a loss is so great, you need a larger platform. Sometimes people create videos, write stories and books. The mother of a female airline pilot who died in a plane crash in the Florida Everglades wrote a book she hopes to get published. It is about the crash but also about how some people used her daughter’s gender as an explanation of why the plane crashed, when it came out that the cause of the crash was an explosion in the cargo hold. She wanted people to know about who her daughter was and how hard she worked to become the first female professional pilot for a major airline.
Some speak about their losses to groups. For example, a mother who lost her daughter to anorexia goes around speaking in schools about eating disorders in teenagers. The parents of a child who climbed into a trunk during a game of hide-and-seek and couldn’t get out lobbied the automobile industry for glowing internal emergency latches to open the trunk from within.
When someone is telling you their story over and over, they are trying to figure something out. There has to be a missing piece or they too would be bored. Rather than rolling your eyes and saying “there she goes again,” ask questions about parts that don’t connect. Be the witness and even the guide. Look for what they want to know. What different angle do you see it from? Ask what the doctor thought or what her husband would say now. What if the shoe had been on the other foot? There is a great invitation for dual exploration that we often miss in the midst of grief.
It feels as if it were somehow your fault. You were there. You saw it all happening. In your perfect hindsight so many things stand out that could have been done differently. But all events require many converging factors in order for them to happen. For example, the tumor could have been found sooner, but we don’t spend our lives looking for illnesses and we don’t have a medical system based on preventive medicine. It is the same when an accident occurs. There is usually more than one factor involved.
Yet you are the one left standing in the wake of your sorrow, seeing the past as something you did wrong. Yes, your loved one could have gone to the doctor sooner. He could have spent his life going every day, but that wouldn’t have been living. And if he had gone more often, the illness still might not have been diagnosed in time. He could have eaten better, exercised more. You could have encouraged him, helped, even forced him.
Maybe you think he should have seen it coming. Maybe it’s not your fault as much as it was his. The sad reality is that, despite our best or worst efforts, we all will die someday, usually sooner than we would like. Plenty of people get annual checkups and screenings of everything, only to find that something bad still happens. However healthy you think you are, remember that vegetarians die too. Jim Fixx, one of the greatest professional runners of all time, died of a heart attack. We do things hopefully because they add life to our living, but not with the illusion they will help us escape death when our time comes.
We know all this intellectually, but still we ask ourselves, “How could something have gone this wrong?” It had to be someone’s fault, we think, and blame is something we must examine in order to find peace.
When a mother’s fourteen-year-old daughter went missing, she contacted all the authorities, filed all the reports, and put her daughter’s information on every conceivable Web site that deals with missing teenagers. She also called the local TV stations, got stories in the newspaper, and read lists of things that one should do to find clues. She drove to all her daughter’s usual hangouts, stopping everywhere and showing everyone the missing person flyers. For three weeks, her life was a one-woman detective-search-and-rescue party, staying up day and night, looking everywhere possible. Then the call came that her daughter’s body had been found two cities away in the trunk of an abandoned stolen car. The mother’s immediate response was, “Oh, my God, why didn’t I think of abandoned stolen cars?”
Bad things happen, illness happens, accidents happen, crimes happen, and we want to prevent them. But the truth is that life is risky and dangerous, and we are the only species on earth who knows that as much as we fear it, death will come to each of us one day.
Part of our terror comes from being bombarded with fear messages from the media. And then, when our relatively safe lives are fraught with tragedy, we look for someone to blame.
Your sorrow is the inevitable result of circumstances beyond your control, and that is always hard to live with. But in time you will get used to it and hopefully begin to see that with additional effort, the results might still have been the same. The loss would still be there even though you did the best you could, and blame is futile because it does not accurately reflect the truth about what happened. In time you will find peace and you will remember your successful role as companion, caregiver, friend, and family member. Death is inevitable, and in most cases, no one is to blame.
Lucy met her friend Stan in a coffee shop. As he was leaving he said, “If you bump into Joann tell her I’ll be at the bowling alley.” Later that same evening Lucy gave the message to Joann, who took off to join Stan at the bowling alley. A few hours later, Lucy’s phone rang. Joann had been hit by a car just outside the bowling alley, and she died instantly. In the midst of the terrible shock, Lucy blamed herself. “If only I hadn’t given her the message, she would be alive right now. It’s all my fault.”
Lucy took her escalating guilt to a grief counselor. He said, “When Christopher Columbus discovered America, it was the result of converging factors. There was exploration in the air and they were searching for other new routes, so if it wasn’t Christopher Columbus it would have been someone else. It was just his time. It’s the same with death, although it is harder to accept. But if you had not given her the message, someone else would have. Or maybe Joann would have gone looking for Stan herself.”
Illness works in exactly the same way. Jeff began having slight headaches when he started managing a second area at work. He figured the headache was due to the sudden and additional stress and asked his wife, Dorothy, to pick up some Tylenol. He took them, but his headache remained. He tried to arrange relaxing evenings at home with his wife to counteract the work stress, but his headaches only got worse. He considered seeing the doctor, but when he switched to Motrin and his head felt better, he and Dorothy both figured they had worked it out.
Two weeks later, the pain came back with such a vengeance, Dorothy drove Jeff to the emergency room. Jeff feared he would be diagnosed with his mother’s illness, migraine headaches, but instead he was diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor. He lived only a few months more, and after his death, Dorothy became obsessed with wishing she had gotten him straight to the doctor. Things might have been different, she thought. Maybe if they had caught it sooner it would have been operable.
Her friends were concerned about her self-blame, and someone suggested that she make an appointment with her husband’s doctor to discuss his case. She did so, and the doctor was happy to see her. When she spoke about her concerns and guilt, he told her gently, “Dorothy, I understand why you feel this was your fault, but it was a fast-growing tumor, very large by the time your husband started having the headaches. If you had come on the first day, the outcome would have been the same. I am so sorry, but you must not blame yourself or him.”
Many cases are not as cut-and-dried as the one above. We are often left with vague factors, with our “what if?” mind alive and well. But how do we make the right choices? In the case of cancer, people are often faced with multiple choices for treatment options, an arena that is a perfect breeding ground for blame. No matter what you choose, no matter how much consideration you give each one, and no matter what the experts say, you still wonder, “What if we had tried one of the other options?”
We have to understand that more often than not, the most tragic of events happens and it’s no one’s fault. None of us knows why one person dies and another survives; such questions lead to a condition of self-blame mixed with guilt, often called survivor’s guilt. But this kind of guilt has no logical basis.
This survivor’s guilt concept first got widespread attention after World War II, as some concentration camp survivors wondered, “Why them and not me?” The phenomenon of survivor’s guilt occurs whenever someone witnesses or survives a catastrophic experience, such as the Oklahoma City bombing, the 9/11 plane crashes, car accidents, and even widespread diseases such as AIDS. It can also strike when a loved one dies from natural causes. Although it is easy to understand why people who have lived through painful or horrific events would wonder why they had been spared, it is ultimately a question without an answer.
We have no control over certain situations, and believing that we do is a form of arrogance. It is not for us to ask why someone dies or why someone lives. Those decisions are left to God and the Universe. And yet, though there is no answer to this question, there is a reason for what has happened: the survivors have been spared in order to live.
The real question is this: If you have been spared in order to live, are you living? Can you be fully living if you don’t grieve your loss?
Blame and guilt can be used, like everything else, to distract ourselves from the pain of loss. It is much easier to get involved in the whys and what ifs than it is to sit with the fact that our beloved is gone forever. Of course, you will go through self-examination, but as you do so, you will find that even the exploration cannot change what has happened. Unless it was a violent crime or gross neglect, no one is to blame.
We are responsible for our health, but we are not the ones to blame for our illnesses.
The phone rang late one evening at the Belson household. Kate answered. She heard the caller’s words without any sign of emotion and then asked the caller to hold on. She yelled to her husband, “Your father is dying, what should I tell them?”
Bill replied, “Tell them to let us know when the funeral is.”
On the surface the words sounded harsh. Yet Kate, Bill’s wife, knew they were appropriate for the situation. Bill’s father had left his family for another woman when Bill was six years old. His father and his new wife moved across the country to “start over and have a more relaxed life with so much less responsibility.” Bill and his brother and sister were left to grow up without a father. Bill’s father made no pretense of caring, no Christmas presents, no happy birthday wishes. Bill watched his mother work as a receptionist and do her best to make ends meet. He grew up resenting his father more than his mother did.
After the call Kate had only one question for Bill. She said, “I understand you not wanting to be at his deathbed, but why go to the funeral?” Bill, unsure of himself, said, “I guess to just say good-bye and good riddance.”
People are often conflicted about the loss of loved ones, especially parents about whom they had mixed emotions. The major block to their dealing with and moving through the loss is that they can’t understand feeling that way about someone they really didn’t like, as in Bill’s case. “My mother was so mean to me. She was literally a tyrant. Why do I care that she died?” one woman asked.
In a film version of Mary Shelley’s famous novel, Frankenstein, Dr. Frankenstein gives life to the monster without any regard for the creature’s happiness or what his life would be like, dooming him to misery and torment. At the end of the story, when Dr. Frankenstein is finally killed, the creature is found crying. When asked why he is crying for the man who brought him such great suffering, the creature replies, very simply, “He was my father.”
We mourn for those who cared for us the way they should have. We also mourn for those who did not give us the love we deserved. We’ve seen this phenomenon over and over: the severely beaten child in the hospital longs for his mother but cannot see her, because she is in jail for having beaten him. You can grieve fully for people who were terrible to you. And if you need to grieve for them, you should do so. We must take time to mourn and experience our losses, and acknowledge the reality that those losses cannot be negated even if we think the person did not deserve our love.
Resentment doesn’t always die with death. It can be a common part of unfinished business we are left with. Resentment is old anger that we never dealt with or had the chance to deal with. It can arise from situations as deliberate or as under the surface as Tony’s.
Tony’s wife, Carol, would always get mad at her kids when they didn’t listen well to their father. She would tell Tony, “They have to listen to you. What if I wasn’t here someday? They need to be listening to you.”
A year later when Carol died in a car accident, Tony would think back on her words and struggle with resentment. He knew the accident was out of her control but often wondered if she had a premonition that she didn’t share with him. And he was resentful that her words came true, that he was left with two kids and no wife. In his bereavement group he would say, “I love her, I miss her, and I resent her for dying.”
Intellectually we know that people don’t want to die on us, but that message does not always translate into our emotional response to the loss.
You cannot grieve only one loss. You may have lost your beloved, but the grief brings into your awareness all the losses that have occurred in your life, past and present. The past losses are the deaths that came before. The present losses are all the changes you have to accommodate in your life to fill the void left behind by your most current loss.
We cannot help but remember losing a parent when we were young or a high school friend killed in a car accident or any other early loss. We may feel all the grief we did not attend to before but still needs attention. What is left ungrieved remains stored in our body, heart, and soul. It can come out each time we experience loss anew.
Jillian was twenty-two when her husband, Todd, was deployed to Vietnam. They were madly in love, and after only one year of marriage he was overseas and she was a military wife, spending her time with many other wives whose husbands were away. They were all young, happy to be married, and excited about the military with all its travel and new experiences. What she hadn’t counted on was her husband’s being killed in action. Suddenly she was back in her hometown as if her husband and the whole military experience had been a dream.
She quickly got a job and then got a promotion to another town. She met a coworker, Jim, and married again. They were together for the next thirty-five years, and their life was full of kids, grandkids, and lots of friends. Then when Jim was killed in a car accident, Jillian was shocked and overwhelmed with grief, but not just for Jim. She was grieving his death at the age of sixty-three when she was hit with the memory of Todd, who had died when she was twenty-three. It was the first time she had tapped deeply into her storehouse of grief for the death of her first husband, which sat just beneath her sorrow for Jim. What she had considered a closed chapter was anything but.
This does not mean she loved one more than the other. It means she had two important losses to grieve, one current and one still unattended to from the past. She confided to a counselor that she felt distracted by her grief for Todd when she wanted so much to grieve Jim’s death. The counselor understood and suggested she fully mourn the loss of her more current husband and stay focused on the funeral preparations. She agreed that when feelings for Todd arose, she would say to herself, “Todd, I will honor you too and I have not forgotten you. But first I must attend to mourning grief over Jim.”
When the funeral was over, Jillian decided to gather all her old photographs and spend a weekend in Biloxi, Mississippi, where Todd had been stationed. She visited their old house, looked through photo albums, and cried all the tears that had been stored up in her body for forty years.
When she came back home, she felt she had honored both of their losses and now she could grieve both of them, as she had increased her capacity to feel love. She felt a great deal lighter after finally crying all the sadness she had put off for young Todd. And she felt fully present to deal with the loss of Jim and to be there for her family in their grief.
Another reason we go back to old losses is that we can visit them more easily now that we are older, deeper human beings. We have a larger palette from which to view the loss. Unlike Jillian, you may have fully grieved your losses at the time, but there is more to grieve as you continue to grow. Thankfully, we develop new tools to work with the grief.
Bill and Rodney were close brothers, less than two years apart. When Bill was twenty-one, Rodney complained of pain in his stomach. Rodney went to the doctor and got some medicine for a presumed ulcer. But that night, Rodney’s appendix ruptured and he died.
Bill was lost without Rodney, and the next few years were dark and sad. He lived his life and functioned fairly well, but he always kept Rodney in his heart. When he married ten years later and began a family, Bill began to live his own life more fully and in deeper appreciation, but he felt new pain for Rodney. Now he was grieving what his brother had missed by dying young: no marriage and no kids. During this time when his friends were all hitting their forties and having midlife crises, Bill looked like he was having one too, but really, he was simply revisiting the loss of Rodney.
With every passing decade, as his kids grew into teenagers, Bill was struck with just how young his brother had been when he died. He told his wife, “I continue to understand loss better and better. I cry more deeply when I think about all that Rodney has missed. I used to tell people how I keep revisiting Rodney’s death, but they didn’t understand. They wanted to know why I hadn’t gotten over him yet. How can I explain to them that grief is not finite? There is nothing static about loss; it keeps changing, just like we do.”
The truth about loss is that the resurgence of old pain and grief has an important purpose. As the pain emerges, we find new ways of healing ourselves that may not have existed before. Return visits to old hurts are an exercise in completion, as we return to wholeness and reintegration.
Another loss is the old “you,” the person you were before this loss occurred, the person you will never be again. Up till now, you didn’t know this kind of sadness. You couldn’t even have imagined anything could feel this bad. Now that you are inconsolable, it feels like the new “you” is forever changed, crushed, broken, and irreparable. These temporary feelings will pass, but you will never be restored to that old person.
What is left is a new you, a different you, one who will never be the same again or see the world as you once did. A terrible loss of innocence has occurred, only to be replaced with vulnerability, sadness, and a new reality where something like this can happen to you and has happened.
There are many other losses you will feel. Perhaps you were married and all your friends were married couples. Now you are a third wheel. They may try to include you and you may try to fit in, but for the most part, many people say they end up losing this set of friends. There can be only so many dinners with couples trying to bring you comfort. Whether it is an active withdrawal on their part or yours, it becomes another loss to deal with.
Another loss is the world in which your loved one lived and included you. Perhaps you were in the corporate world and your wife taught theater. On your own, you never would have gone to play openings or met actors, directors, and writers. But that was your wife’s world and you had a place in it. Once she is gone, however, you have a few token dinners with colleagues and grieve together, you may still get invited to some plays, but it is not the same. You don’t fit into that world anymore without your wife.
You also lose the activities you may have done together. The ritual of going to your favorite restaurant for Sunday night dinner is no more. Going on your own or with a friend doesn’t feel right. Maybe you and your spouse golfed together or bowled together. Whatever activity you loved is now gone or has become a solo activity, and it will never feel the same.
For some there are financial concerns, as finding new ways to survive and bring in new income is a loss all its own. In some cases, people are forced to sell their houses, another huge loss that feels like going from insult to injury, loss upon loss.
Besides all the external losses, there are the ones that resonate within you—the loss of your beloved as a companion, a sounding board, and a life partner. She was the one to whom you told everything. She was a witness to your life. You didn’t need to preface anything or give the background. You had continuity with someone you loved, someone who knew your past and discussed your friends and your work, and someone who helped you make decisions.
It is a tremendous and heartrending adjustment you must make to a new world full of losses. No one can stand where you are and survey all that you have lost. That is for you and you alone to know.
Perhaps you can take comfort in knowing that with time, you will find new ways, new things, and even new people to be with. You will discover a world of things outside yourself and inside yourself that you never knew existed.
But for now, your task is to grieve and feel this loss and all your other losses.
Grief is also the shattering of many conscious and unconscious beliefs about what our lives are supposed to look like.
Many of us share certain common beliefs: that after we’re born, we’ll have a good childhood—or if it’s a challenging one, we’ll make it through and grow stronger from it. Then we will meet our special someone, get married, and find a career. We understand that we may not get the greatest job in the world, and our marriage won’t be perfect, but we will love our kids and for the most part, we expect to be satisfied. Finally, when we are old and gray, we will invite the family over to look at old photo albums, tell each one how much we love them, and then, that very night, die peacefully in our sleep.
Those are our beliefs, our hopes, our fantasies, the way life should unfold. But what happens when someone gets cancer at forty? What happens when a loved one is killed in a car accident? Or a child dies? That is not the way things were supposed to happen. Life was never supposed to be perfect but was always supposed to be long. Disease, earthquakes, accidents, and planes flying into buildings are not supposed to happen. When these things do happen, we not only must grieve the loss, we also must grieve the loss of the belief that it shouldn’t have happened at all.
How do these beliefs start? When a four-year-old child asks, “Daddy, how come people die?” the most comfortable answer is, “Because their body gets old and worn out.”
That is an appropriate answer for a four-year-old, and there are few alternatives. We can say, “Son, this is a random, chaotic world, and I might have cancer right now as we speak. In fact, you might too. This could be my last day and for that matter, it could be yours.”
No one expects us to say these things to a child, but as children grow, we need to update their views on life and death. If we don’t, we perpetuate the beliefs and assumptions that nothing ever goes wrong. If that is the belief a child takes with her into adulthood, she will have little sense of reality and a hard time coping with life. Much like polishing a rock in a tumbler, it is the tumbling of life that makes the diamond.
When a loss hits us, we have not only the particular loss to mourn but also the shattered beliefs and assumptions of what life should be.
These life beliefs must be mourned separately. Sometimes we must grieve for them first. We can’t grieve the loss if we are in the midst of “It’s not supposed to happen this way.” We have all seen that shock and numbness on people’s faces. We intellectually know that bad things happen—but to other people, not us, and certainly not in the world we assumed we were living in.
When there is an exception to our belief system, we want to assign a reason that makes us feel safer. For instance, when someone reads about a plane crash, he might say, “Well, there are just too many planes in the sky. If we weren’t flying all over the place, people wouldn’t die in large numbers.”
The reality is people have always died in large numbers in natural disasters such as avalanches, earthquakes, and tornadoes. But in our current belief system, we don’t find anything natural about them.
Even the belief that a child is not supposed to get sick and die, that a child’s death is unnatural, is not a reality. If you look back a hundred years, infant mortality rates were very high and were considered a part of life. If you had seven children, you knew that only a few would survive. That was reality.
Today we believe that modern medicine can cure anything that ails us, and we relax into that belief. Aaron was the youngest and strongest of his five brothers. By the time they reached their thirties, Aaron was very athletic, a healthy eater, and he nagged his brothers to be the same. They just weren’t interested in exercise and didn’t care about their physical health, but they admired Aaron’s dedication.
You can only imagine the shock and devastation when Aaron, at age thirty-one, was diagnosed with advanced colon cancer. After his death, they could not explain how this had happened to Aaron, the only brother of the six who took good care of himself.
In essence, they were struggling with their crushed belief system that if they did the right things, they would have a good result. It is easy to understand this assumption until we remember that athletes die too—and they have heart attacks. It leaves us to wonder, why bother trying to be healthy? The answer is that healthy living can prevent some conditions from developing or being exacerbated. But the belief that healthy living will stop us from dying is a hard belief system to hold together when we are deep in grief.
In the grieving process, we also need to take time to mourn the life we were supposed to have. We need to honor our loss by reminding ourselves that “It didn’t happen to someone else, it happened to me.” Take the time to live with the question of “Why me?” For some the answer is “Why not me? Why should I be excluded from life’s losses?”
Your belief system needs to heal and regroup as much as your soul does. You must start to rebuild a new belief system from the foundation up, one that has room for the realities of life and still offers safety and hope for a different life: a belief system that will ultimately have a beauty of its own to be discovered with life and loss.
Think of a lifeless forest in which a small plant pushes its head upward, out of the ruin. In our grief process, we are moving into life from death, without denying the devastation that came before.
You are alone. There is a wall now where none existed before, standing between you and the rest of the world.
But your isolation is not related to your surroundings or the people in your world. You can be in a large group of friends and relatives and feel as disconnected as if you were lost in the desert. There is no port in this storm, and the one person who could bring you connection is the one person who is gone forever. And so, you feel you will be forever lost.
Friends are concerned that you have shut down and seem disconnected from the outside. In fact, this kind of isolation over an extended period of time may be cause for alarm, and indeed you may need help. But feeling isolated after loss is normal, expected, and healthy. Even when friends urge you to talk about it (they are certainly being caring), you wonder what there is to say. Sometimes people’s desire to deliver you from your isolation may have more to do with their own fear and discomfort than with a concern for yours.
How can your friends not understand that your loss has shut you down and that isolation comes with a profound silence all its own? You have entered an abnormal, lonely, and unwelcome new world where you are nothing but an island of sadness. And so far, there is no way out, no matter what anybody else wants for you.
Lily was terribly isolated after her husband and two children were killed by a teenager in a car, rushing to a class. She sank heavily into isolation, and after months of no apparent change, a group of well-meaning friends did an intervention. They appeared at her house one Tuesday evening, and she opened the door without surprise or emotion. They explained their concern and she said, “I feel a kind of isolation that you’ll never be able to understand. What you see is a mere fraction of what’s happening inside, but at least my inner and outer worlds are reflecting each other. You wouldn’t want me to throw my worlds off balance, would you?”
“But maybe going out into the world and doing things would help,” her closest friend suggested. “Wouldn’t you like to try?”
Lily stared off into space. “That might work for you, but I need to be where I am right now. I love you for caring and I don’t expect anyone to understand. All I can say is that I know there will come a time to live again, but this is not the time.”
For Lily, isolation was an important tool for grieving, as it brought harmony to her inner and outer realities. She instinctually knew this, and she also knew that getting back out there was premature for her. And she knew the time would come.
The death of a loved one often leaves you isolated symbolically as well as physically. You were with someone and now you are not. You thought for two, you planned your meals around someone else, maybe you were siblings together, lovers together, or best friends in a million different adventures. How can you not feel isolated?
Isolation is a very important stop on the path of grief, but usually, it should only be a step along the way. When you stay too long and get stuck, healing can get further and further away. Isolating too much and for too long can result in your world becoming tighter and closer, until you can literally become paralyzed.
A lack of an expressive outlet is one of the toughest parts of isolation. With anger, you can get mad at someone and yell. With sadness, you can cry. But isolation feels like being in a room with no doors or windows—a place with no way out. And the longer you get stuck there, the harder it becomes to share the pain and sorrow that create the portals for your movement into the next phase of grief. In isolation, hope disappears, despair rules, and you can no longer glimpse a life beyond the invisible walls that imprison you.
Some people find it helpful to work gently at propelling themselves back into the world. In one case, a woman reported that after four miserable forced lunches with friends, she suddenly enjoyed the fifth one as she found herself laughing at a joke, even after all she’d been through. For people who cannot push themselves, however, bereavement groups are a good antidote for isolation. They allow you to maintain a sense of privacy and aloneness while at the same time, they offer the opportunity for connection in a safe and controlled way.
In time, you will find a bridge back to the outside world. For many, a good way is to talk to others who have experienced loss, another recommendation for bereavement groups. When you feel isolated and you find yourself sitting next to someone who feels the same way, you start to feel a little less so. Perhaps the two of you actually replace some of the isolation with a sense of bonding.
Billy felt completely isolated while his mother was dying. Everyone around him was experiencing their own grief, assuming that at ten years old, Billy had no capacity for grief as yet. Of course, that wasn’t true. If you are old enough to love, you are old enough to grieve. Grief just looks different in children, and during his mother’s hospital stay, although it concerned the social worker, Billy found solace sitting alone on the stairwell.
The problem was that while his mother lay on the verge of death, he was not eligible for a bereavement group. One day, a woman whose husband was also in the intensive care unit passed the boy on the stairwell. She said hello and kept on walking, not wanting to intrude on his solitude. But later that day, she came and sat down next to him, in overwhelm from her own grief. “Can I be alone with you here?” she asked.
Billy nodded. For the next few days, they would spend time together on the stairwell, just the two of them, talking about loved ones occasionally but spending much of the time in silence. Both families thought that Billy and his new friend were isolating themselves. They were, but it was the healthiest thing they could do, as their isolation became their point of connection. In fact, the bond they forged that was born out of loneliness and tragedy became a friendship that lasted for the next twenty years.
This wise woman understood that grief in children feels different than it does in adults. Kids don’t have the words or permission to voice their grief, while adults have trouble expressing the emotions. But whatever one does to survive and manage the grief, being alone often feels safer than being vulnerable with people who may not understand.
As in the case of Billy, isolation is not always an obstacle. Rather, it can be a necessary way station.
If it’s time for you to move beyond the isolation, here are some ways to begin: Call a friend and ask for suggestions or companionship. Introduce an activity into your isolation like painting, gardening, or walking. Nature has a way of healing the soul. Besides bereavement groups, which we mentioned above, there is private counseling for those who are not drawn to interacting with groups of others as yet. If you are ready to venture out a bit, try sitting at the back of a class or a group activity and see how it feels. At first, of course, it may feel forced until something sparks your interest.
Isolation is part of your grief and may serve as an important transition back into life. Ultimately, isolation is a darkness to experience, but not a place in which to live.
We all have secrets, some big and others quite insignificant. Regardless of the size, they are ours and for whatever reason we have chosen not to share these bits of information.
After a loved one has died it is not unusual to uncover a secret or two here or there. The hardest part is that the secret represents something we perceive as them withholding from us personally. It may be very painful to find out a loved one had a gambling habit or strayed from a marriage. Secrets can leave behind more than just a bit of information. They often leave many questions in their wake. Sometimes the secret our mate or sibling hid from us may be about their past before they met us or before we were born. The truth about life is that we don’t usually share all of what we have done or where we have been.
A tremendous shock arises when a secret is discovered. Sometimes you must take time to deal with the shock separately from the grief. In many ways there are two forms of grief to deal with: the loss of the person you loved and your reaction to the secret. This reaction is often a component of grief. The sadness, anger, resentment, betrayal, or mystery it leaves in its wake must be felt on its own.
Not all secrets are negative in nature. Loved ones are shocked to find that someone about whom they thought they knew everything had a secret hobby or passion. People will often encounter a part of their loved one that was positive and be equally puzzled that they didn’t share that part of themselves. It is an illusion that we know everything about each other or that we even should.
If you try to keep a secret, such as the circumstances around a death, perhaps suicide, it may cause a barrier between you and receiving support in your loss. When a loss is acknowledged by another, instead of receiving the care, you hear the secret or lie you created. That secret may make it difficult to find healing in the situation.
Just as people have secrets in their lives, they also have them in their deaths and grieving. For some, to grieve is to be weak. They have the misperception that to grieve is not to be able to handle a sorrowful situation. But when people hide their grief, it becomes a secret in itself. How many times has someone appeared to show no emotions, acted like nothing was wrong, and kept their grief a secret? We say, “How can they be doing so well?”
There are certain cases, however, when for whatever reason, we must keep grief a secret. A funeral director spoke about how every once in a while he would have what he called “after hours.” He was referring to the times he got a call from the ex-wife, the mistress, the illegitimate son, the black sheep of the family, the one who would not be welcomed to grieve at the funeral.
A woman named Joyce shared how she married young and her marriage ended in a mutually agreed upon divorce. Both she and her ex-husband went on to remarry and have other families, but Joyce said, “I never stopped loving him. He was my first love, my first marriage. I would never dare tell him, for I wouldn’t want to harm my family or his, but he knew anyway.
“When he died I wanted to cry for him but I felt that as the ex-wife, I needed to keep a low profile for his family. I wanted to honor my deep, deep sadness without any disrespect, so I called up the funeral director and told him my problem. He accommodated me and let me show up at the funeral home after hours.”
In many situations, for many reasons, we sometimes feel that people should not show their grief. Whether the hiding is valid or necessary isn’t really the issue. The issue is that hiding grief and keeping the secret makes grief more complicated to deal with.
People sometimes decide to keep secret the cause of the death of a loved one. They may think the real reason was unacceptable, as when a son dies of AIDS and the family says he had cancer. When and why people do this is often a mystery to others around them. There may be a clear prejudice or there may not. For example, when an elderly woman died of pancreatic cancer, her son wanted everyone to think it was pneumonia. For some reason he thought pneumonia was acceptable and cancer was not. We are also seeing this with Alzheimer’s. People may find some behavior embarrassing, but that doesn’t mean we should be ashamed that our loved one has the disease.
Josh was in his midfifties when he had financial problems that were so severe, he took his own life. His wife told everyone it was a heart attack, since the story of a man “who had a full life and suddenly died” was much better than that of a man who had taken his own life. But what price did this widow pay for her secret? Her grief became so much harder to handle when well-meaning friends would say to her, “At least it was sudden and he had a good death.”
Her perception that he did not have a good death became a secret that only added to her pain. Loss is hard enough without burdening yourself with a secret. If you can’t be completely honest with the general public, find at least one or two people who can witness your grief honestly and openly.
In most cases, a secret lives long after a death occurs. Marshall was a good husband. He and his wife, Cynthia, a housewife, mother, and grandmother, had a long and satisfying marriage for forty years. After Cynthia died, the family was going through some old trunks and found many awards she received during her college years for journalism and speech. She’d even won a statewide speech contest, and Marshall was shocked that his wife had so much talent and had never said a word.
He was left wondering what it meant that she had a gift but didn’t choose to pursue it. Did he not provide an atmosphere in their marriage for her to express such talent? He would never know the answer, but he hoped she was happy with him. He just hoped she was happy with who she had become and didn’t long for a dream unfulfilled that could have been. He just knew he would like to have known more about her. He struggled in his grief with her secret and the question: did she not tell or did he not ask?
A secret ultimately doesn’t change the person you knew. Every facet of a diamond is real, but each is a different view, so don’t let all that you held dear about your loved one be negated by some other part of them. What you knew was real. What you found out was most likely real also. If it was negative, do your best to realize they were merely mortal just as you are. Forgive them if you need to, and try to accept the parts of them you didn’t know. Death can invade our privacy and deprive us of the chance to explain our actions.
As hard as it may be to understand, the withholding of a secret is usually not about you. It is about your loved one’s keeping a part of themself just for the sake of their own identity or maybe not feeling good about a part of their own life. Perhaps keeping the secret actually gave them pleasure. You may feel that you would have understood had you been given the chance. You may be angry that you weren’t given the chance. That makes perfect sense, since death robs us of our chances at many things, including the chance to redeem ourselves if that was our intent.
Your loved one may never have intended to share all of herself with you. If you think about it, you most likely did not share all of yourself as well.
Just imagine the shoe being on the other foot. What if you had died? Are there secrets your loved one would find out about you?
Many people find compassion for their loved one when they think about the tables being turned on their secrets.
What did you do so wrong to deserve this kind of punishment? What did your loved one ever do to deserve their illness and death? Nothing. But that does not stop us from feeling punished.
“If I had been a better person, maybe this wouldn’t have happened.” Or maybe you realize your imperfections but feel that “the crime doesn’t fit the punishment.” It doesn’t. We live under the assumption that if we are just, we will not suffer. But to have life is to know death. To love is ultimately to lose what we have had the privilege of loving.
For some, the idea of punishment may come from religion and a God that punishes. Actions have consequences, but as counselors we do not believe that loss comes from punishment. In the light of loss, all our transgressions may feel illuminated and we may feel punished, but an all-loving God would not bestow such pain on us. Death may follow life, but punishment is not God’s consequence for loving and caring.
Sometimes the memory of punishment goes all the way back to our childhoods. It is not unusual to hear someone say, “I feel punished, but I can’t remember what I did to deserve this kind of pain.”
Robert was pleased that the tumor near his spine was removed and he was now cancer free. He talked about what a gift cancer was, which is common among people who go into remission. Others with cancer disagree, saying if cancer was a gift, they would give it back. But what Robert was really talking about was the gifts that he got from facing death. He talked about how he had felt punished for his life but now he had turned over a new leaf. He began reading books on curing ailments and articles on how negative thinking or the lack of positive thinking affects us and we create our own illnesses. He studied diets that promised to keep him cancer-free, did prayers in the morning and meditation at night, and he returned to church.
The problem was that he was not doing these things out of a sense of love for himself or his community. He was doing them out of fear as he bargained, “God, if I give you all of this, then will the cancer not come back?”
Robert was sure he had beaten it because of all his hard work, but a year later they found another lump in his abdomen. He felt completely defeated and punished. “What did I miss?” he kept asking himself as he started chemotherapy. “I thought I was cured, but what spiritual lesson is this? Why am I being punished again?”
We have many rounds with diseases in this life, and the common language we use is that we “beat” our disease and “win” the battle. But if the reality is that we are all destined to die someday, does that mean the disease wins and we lose? Some people believe that if they become spiritual enough, they will be able to cure their diseases. That, however, is bargaining, not spirituality! Spirituality is not a cure for disease. It’s our reconnection with ourselves, with our soul, and with life, even in the face of death. It is the way we seek peace. Perhaps Robert’s lesson was to accept things just as they were. Maybe he did absolutely nothing wrong and things were unfolding just as they were intended.
Finding inner peace, forgiving yourself and others, and being calmer will benefit your body, but spirituality in itself is not always a healing of the body. And falling ill does not mean that you are doing something wrong. True spirituality is not about blaming or finding fault. It’s about reaching into the purest part of yourself, the part that is connected to love, the part that is (if you believe it to be) connected to God, the part that is beyond the body and health and disease. Spirituality is concerned with the mind and spirit, and the body.
In your childhood, you may have experienced a parental discipline style that included punishment as a result of a mistake, but this is different. You are different. Grief causes us to define our God and his attributes more closely. Is he a punishing God? Does he give out horrible pain for our human experience, including the mistakes that go with being human?
In our modern-day culture we have come to believe that an all-loving, all-caring God will offer us a world in which death is optional. When we are not in grief, we can see that is not true, but when life is at its toughest, it’s easy to believe that God callously uses death as punishment. The reality is that God gives us a life cycle that includes death. We live in a world of duality. God created day with night, light with shadow, and life with death. You may be able to do a reexamination of your God by getting angry at him. Do what you need to release him as the punisher and you as the one who is punished.
That doesn’t mean that your feelings of punishment aren’t real. If you have lost a child, how could you not feel punished in some way? If a parent says they found meaning and did not feel punished in losing a child, it is usually years later.
Sometimes feeling punished keeps us connected to our loved ones, but there are other, better contexts in which to hold your memories.
When we look back in time, death has always been distasteful to man, and probably always will be. It may be a point on a continuum, and the soul may be eternal, but death has always been painful and associated with punishment. This can best be explained by our basic knowledge that in our own mortality, we cannot fully comprehend an ending to our own life here on earth. If this life of ours has to end, the ending is always attributed to a malicious intervention from the outside by someone or something else. Therefore death in itself is associated with a bad act or a frightening event, something that in itself calls for a retribution and punishment. So if we feel on a primal level that our own death would be a punishment, why wouldn’t we feel punished with a loved one’s death?
In our unconscious mind, we cannot distinguish between a feeling and a deed, just as our unconscious mind cannot distinguish between our anger at someone and a wish to kill them or be rid of them. The child who wishes his mother would leave him alone or stop bugging him will be greatly traumatized by the actual death of his mother. Even if these events are not linked closely in time, he will always take part or all of the blame for the loss. On some deep level he may feel “I did it.” He may feel his anger at his mother made him responsible.
As adults, we will always make mistakes and do things we are not proud of. And on some level, if our loved one dies, we may feel like we deserve the loss: we are being punished because we weren’t as loving as we could have been. There are those who channel their sense of punishment into good deeds. While it would be preferable not to feel punished in the first place, our feelings should not be denied, and some people feel that they need to work off their punishment. If they can ultimately forgive themselves, doing good in the world is much healthier than being destructive.
A chaplain noticed that people who feel punished sometimes need to confess in order to address unresolved issues. There may be a question in someone’s mind as to their part in the death, and they may feel they need redemption. On a primal level, disobeying God may mean death to certain people. In fact, there is a long history in the Old Testament of a punishing God. You may need to feel the sorrow of your forgiveness or give or receive an apology in order not to get stuck. In grief we can be more connected to loss than grace. In grace we restore the relationship through forgiveness.
The saving grace of loss is that the hardships are an opportunity for growth. The first reaction to a statement like this is, “God could let me grow by taking a class, not by losing a loved one.” But you are unable to see or understand this kind of growth until years into the future when you look back on your life.
The Grand Canyon was not punished by windstorms over hundreds of years. In fact, it was created by them. Your loss may feel like a punishment, but you are not the product of a God who punishes you with a loved one’s death. You are a creation with the unbelievable power to weather life’s toughest storms.
If someone had tried to shield the Grand Canyon from the windstorm, we would never have seen the beauty of its carvings.
Being ill often makes us feel desperately out of control. Today’s medical system demands hypervigilance as doctors spend so little time with patients and nurses are overwhelmed, overworked, and underpaid. It feels like a fatal mistake may be right around the corner, and if we remove our attention and support for even a second, our loved one could disappear.
This kind of pressure can easily turn us into “control freaks,” as we are revved up with inhuman vigilance to make sure everything is done correctly. When our loved one dies, that state of control can continue into the funeral. After all, there are calls and decisions to be made as to the type of ceremony, including where and when.
Randi shared in her bereavement group about her husband’s stay in the hospital. “There was so much to do and control,” she said, “but now I see that it was just busyness. Ultimately, it was out of my hands, and the things I worried about made no difference in the end. But I had to be doing something.”
This is like the stereotypical way we rush to boil water when a woman is giving birth. We don’t need boiled water any longer, since sterilization is done these days in a high-tech way. But just as Randi described, it gives us something to do. However, when things begin to settle down, we are still left with the need to control, even when we don’t recognize it.
Have you found yourself obsessing over things after a death in the family? A mother and daughter were so caught up in control when the man of the house was dying, they constantly fought with each other. They hadn’t fought before, but now they couldn’t agree on anything. Should they keep the room warm or cold? Should they take a nontraditional or Western approach? Even after he died, they kept fighting, this time over the raising of the grandkids. They each had gotten into the habit of controlling, and when their loved one passed away, they couldn’t stop.
The truth is that they were fighting over lost control, so their arguing, as bad as it felt, was better than feeling the loss. Control covers painful feelings such as sadness, hurt, and anger. Many of us would prefer to fight it out rather than feel grief, loss, and seemingly inconsolable pain.
But control feels empty and harsh as it covers up the more vulnerable sensations underneath. Control gives the illusion of safety and helps us think we are holding everything together, but an illusion is all it is. And breaking it is a daunting task. In the movie Broadcast News, Holly Hunter played a very controlling news producer. In one scene she is confronted about her controlling behavior by her boss, who says sarcastically, “It must be great to always be right.”
Her unexpected answer? “No, it’s hell.”
Trying to control the uncontrollable ultimately becomes a living hell, and grief has a way of amplifying everything and making people slaves to their own behavior. No one at Gerald’s bakery felt they could do anything right after he lost his wife. Nothing was being handled properly, the cakes didn’t taste as good as usual, the deliveries went out slower, and there was dissension among the previously happy employees. Pam, who had worked with Gerald for years, approached the man’s mother. “We’re doing everything the same way we’ve done it for years,” she said, “but Gerald feels like nothing we do is right. We got things running smoothly when he was with his wife in the hospital for a month, but now that he’s trying to control everything, he sees us as inadequate and incompetent.”
Gerald’s mother took her son aside and said, “If you get everything perfect at work, it won’t bring her back. The world is not perfect, and you can’t fix your grief by obsessing over things that don’t need fixing. Your staff knows what they’re doing.”
She continued, “Do you remember how clean the house was after your father died and what a neat person I became? Nothing was in its right place, and I kept rearranging the furniture because I was trying to fix something that wasn’t fixable. One day, I found you and your sister crying. Your sister said to me, ‘Mommy, we can’t make everything perfect.’ In that moment I realized what I was doing.”
Gerald reluctantly realized that his mother was right. His need to control was getting him nowhere and was making work harder for everyone else. Things weren’t perfect, and they could never go back to the way they were before his wife died. He let go of overcontrolling his staff and put his energy into some much-needed repairs on his house.
Grief can turn friends into controllers as well, as they try to end your grief so they can feel better. When Karen lost her best friend of ten years to liver disease, she was devastated. A few of her friends had planned a cruise to the Bahamas and they decided the best thing for Karen was to join them. They told her no ifs, ands, or buts, she was coming with them.
She didn’t feel like joining them, but her friends would not take no for an answer. When her ship pulled up anchor and sailed off, Karen knew she had made a mistake. While her friends were having the time of their lives eating, drinking, and dancing, she walked the decks aimlessly, unable to stop thinking about her friend. She labeled the liner “The Ghost Ship” while her friends tried to drag her to banquets and activities. All she wanted to do was sit in silence, and when she got back home, she wished she had listened to her inner voice instead of allowing her friends to control her.
When Karen’s friends tried to control her grief, she learned the hard way that grief travels with you, wherever you go.
But control doesn’t always have to be negative. Walter’s father, who was grieving the loss of his wife, complained about all the decisions he had to make. It was so hard for him to be on his own, he could barely decide what to have for dinner. Walter, who lived across the country, said, “Dad, why don’t you come out here for a few months? When you get here, I promise you won’t have a single decision. Just get on the plane.” He sent his father a ticket, knowing he could cash it in if necessary. But his dad took the bait in the guise of not wanting to waste the ticket.
For the next three months, Walter made good on his promise. He lovingly controlled his father’s every move, asking for his help in his construction business and keeping up the garden. In essence, taking control of his father’s life was the greatest gift he could ever have offered as his father slowly healed his grief.
And so, whether it is perceived as helpful or intrusive, trying to stop someone from controlling others can be the ultimate controlling act.
Let your intuition guide you, since control can be like salt: a dab of it can make something a little better, but too much can spoil it completely.
“Moving Mom from Boston to Phoenix,” says Beth, “was the best thing we ever did. And when the house next door came on the market at an affordable price, it was an unbelievable coincidence. Mom loves being next door to us. She says she loves waking up early and coming over and making coffee and breakfast for everyone. We feel like an old-fashioned close-knit family. The kids love having Grandma around, and she says they make her feel young again.
“Our biggest problem is the path that got worn on the lawn between our houses. I can’t believe it’s been five years since she moved here. She’s actually thinking about taking a Spanish class with our nineteen-year-old. Life is so much richer with her . . .”
Beth’s eyes welled up with tears. “That was the fantasy,” she said. “I never dreamed I would be at her funeral only three months after she moved here.”
We are never lacking a fantasy about how things should be. From our earliest memories we fantasize about our lives and how they will be, who will be with us, and how it will all turn out in the end. When we are grieving, it is hard to let go of the fantasies, especially when death has taken a loved one from us unexpectedly. Beth and her mother shared a fantasy about retirement. They made the plans and did the move; then her mother unexpectedly became ill. Now Beth lives with the fantasy of what might have been.
Beth not only has the loss of her mother to grieve, but she also needs to separately and simultaneously mourn the fantasy. Loss is so complex and complicated that at times we need to break it down into parts: the loss of Mother, Grandmother, friend, and the life that was left unlived. The fantasy left behind is part of that loss too and deserves its own grief. Grief feels even more overwhelming when all the parts and losses of it are dumped on us like crates of old belongings that we can’t let go. But if we can separate out the parts and give each of them its due, they can feel like a warm, sad shower we take to cleanse our souls. In Beth’s case, she needed to grieve her mother, but she also needed to grieve the fantasy of how they would live next to each other for a decade or two.
A few weeks after the funeral they put the house back on the market and it sold quickly. But the sale was not based on price alone. Beth requested to meet the potential buyers and told them what the house had meant to her. She was pleased that they were sensitive to her story, because she had vowed not to sell to anyone who did not exhibit compassionate feelings for her and her mother.
Before escrow closed, she brought an air mattress to the house that her mother had never really had a chance to occupy. She spent the night there, crying for the lost fantasy that the house represented.
When the new family took possession, Beth had let go enough to wish them well. Her choice to do a ritual that was not only about grieving her mother but grieving the house was a good one.
For Beth, mourning what never happened was tangible. In some cases, however, it is not so easy. When Jim’s wife died, he had no plans to move, and yet he still had the fantasy of their retirement and their trips that never happened. But unlike Beth, he had no house in which to spend the night. How would Jim mourn a trip to Africa that they had planned for many years? Jim did not want to do this trip without his wife, and in a grief workshop he talked about being unable to mourn the trip that never was. When he asked for suggestions, the facilitator suggested he get to the roots of the idea. How did it come about?
Jim explained it was a number of events. He and his wife had liked the movie Out of Africa so much, they visited San Diego’s Wild Animal Park and decided then and there that when they retired, they would go on a real African safari.
For Jim, getting to the roots of the idea became the way to separate and mourn the retirement fantasy. He rented Out of Africa, watched it alone, and cried the whole way through. In a few weeks, he took a solitary day trip to San Diego’s Wild Animal Park. He felt that these rituals provided a tangible way to grieve the adventure that might have been.
We can also get lulled into fantasy thinking that is not realistic, such as how we could have changed the outcome: “If I had been with him, I could have stopped the car accident.” The truth is that in most cases the death would have happened anyway. But in our fantasy of changing things, we get to connect with our loved one, see them alive in our mind, and bargain that they might temporarily come alive again.
We also rewrite the past in smaller ways concerning our loved ones. We idealize what was and who our loved one was. Joseph and Sophie had had a challenging relationship. Joseph never really found the career success he wanted, which had caused them to move a lot, leaving Sophie feeling uprooted most of the time. She also had health problems that caused her to have bad days and worse days, living with kidney disease that wreaked havoc if she didn’t monitor her health and diet closely. All this, mixed with his temper and her selfishness, only worsened with her illness. She would often feel insecure and imagined that Joseph was unfaithful.
At first he tried to convince her that it was not true, but he grew tired of the accusations and began to resent her. They spent more time arguing than talking, but as her health failed, he stood fast by her side. After she died, in his grief, he began to reconstruct their life together as one in which Sophie could do no wrong. He saw her as never having been anything less than perfect and loving, and in his mind he created a powerful fantasy about who she was. He, like so many others before him, idealized her in death with a marriage they never had in life.
People often change reality to fantasy after death. Some of this is cultural. We are taught never to speak ill of the dead, and we feel guilty for even remembering the mistakes they made. We often idealize the person we lost to subconsciously convey the enormity of what is gone. The greater the person, we think, the more others will understand all that we have lost.
Sometimes we just purify the past to make it more palatable. We don’t want to air our mistakes, especially in loss. The downside to all this is that we may miss mourning the total person and all that they were, good and bad, light and dark.
“Be strong.” These two little words are often declared to those in grief. Men hear them more often than women, and surviving parents are told, “Be strong for the sake of the children.”
Jennifer heard those words after her husband died. “My loss was so bad,” she said, “I never knew how to take those words of advice. Did people think I wasn’t supposed to cry in front of the kids? I didn’t, just because someone told me not to. But I began to get angry, as if they were telling me I was grieving wrong. I didn’t want to have to be strong. My heart was too shattered to put on airs. And yet I did. I did it for the kids, I thought.”
We are often told to be strong by people with good intentions. “Take it like a man,” the message tells us. “You’re showing too much emotion. Don’t be a wimp.” As if we shouldn’t be affected by death. But sometimes our “be strong” means not being human.
That kind of bravery belongs to heroes who need to act in the face of danger. But bravery does not mean being unfeeling. In our society it has become confused with keeping a stiff upper lip. The bottom line is that strength can certainly be channeled into loss, but it can also violate it.
A senior in high school was playing on the school football team when his mother died. The very next day, the rival school was coming to play them in the big game, and the teenager was shattered. His coach said, “Play for your mom, be strong, be brave, go win it for her.”
That sounded like a great movie plot, but the team was on a losing streak and they lost that day too. Years later the young man talked about how violated he had felt. “The last place I wanted to be was on a football field, but I didn’t know what else to do.” In his case, there were no points for not grieving and none for being brave.
There are situations, however, that go the other way when someone consciously directs his grief into the game to honor a loved one. But even then it often sends a message that to grieve well, you get up and get on with it. The problem with that premise is that in order to be strong, one has to shut down the emotions.
Why do people tell us to be strong? Maybe because they hear it in the movies in such a motivational way, it seems that it does no harm or causes no interference in the grieving process. And then, people are always more comfortable when the grieving person does not give off the sense that he or she is falling apart. If the grieving person doesn’t cry and express too many emotions, we won’t feel too much either. The truth is that pain can be contagious. You can’t be around someone in deep sadness and not feel it, so if we put a lid on the grieving person’s emotions, we won’t have to deal with them ourselves.
But at what cost do we camouflage our grief? When we shelve our pain, it doesn’t go away. Rather, it festers in a myriad of ways. We need to understand that strength and grief fit together. We must be strong to handle grief, and in the end, grief brings out strengths we never knew we had.
Jennifer was told to be strong for her children when her husband died. Today she wonders about the message her dry eyes implied. Did her children think she didn’t care? “What if I did cry in front of the kids? What if I modeled grief for them in that way? I could have said, ‘Mommy is sad and crying because Daddy has died.’ I could have reassured them that I was still strong enough to be there for them and take care of them.” Children need to know that strong people cry when loved ones die and that does not hamper their ability to go on with life. Jennifer feels she missed an opportunity to share her loss instead of demonstrating a façade of false strength.
Strength in grief shows up in many different ways. Wanda, grieving the loss of her twin brother, Dwayne, to cancer, was devastated by his absence. A month into her loss, a friend, Gail, came to visit and was horrified to see Wanda in her pajamas, still sobbing uncontrollably.
“You have to be strong,” Gail told her distraught friend. “It’s Saturday. Let’s go shopping. You need to get back out there. It’s been a whole month. You can’t work all week and cry all weekend. What kind of a life is that?”
Wanda looked at her friend through her tears and asked, “What’s so strong about going to the mall? Gail, the real question is, do you have the strength to sit here with me in my sorrow?”
Wanda had the strength to say what others only wish they’d said. All too often, someone chooses shopping or fishing to placate a friend or to avoid their own pain. Most of us would do just about anything rather than sit with someone in grief. But grief must be fully experienced to provide the healing on the other side. The only way out is through it, so you can put it off but you can’t skip it. To delay it is to live with grief sitting mildly in the background, or for some, not so mildly.
When the pain and sadness hit, you can do what Wanda was attempting to do. Just sit with it. If you feel sad, let yourself feel that sadness. Do the same with anger and disappointment. If you need to cry all day long, do it. The only thing to avoid is repressing the hurt or artificially trying to bring it on when it isn’t raw enough to express. What we are trying to achieve here is to feel the pain and then feel the release that follows it.
Be aware that when grief hits in all of its power, we instinctually try to resist the sense of overwhelm. But resistance to pain only serves to amplify it. Try sinking into it and feel it become more spacious. Allow it to wash over you and feel the strength return to your body and your mind. When you surrender to grief, you will discover that you are so much stronger than you ever imagined. Peace lies at the center of the pain, and although it will hurt, you will move through it a lot faster than if you distracted yourself with external outings.
Wanda’s instincts told her exactly what she needed and she followed them, even when her friend disagreed. Although there are times when the mind needs a rest and a little distraction can be a good thing, one of the greatest injustices we can do to a friend is try to pull them out of grief before they’re ready. You just can’t look to anyone else to tell you when your sadness will be over. It may be a month, a year, two years, or a lot longer. Only you will know when your loss is integrated and it’s time to come out and rejoin the world.
We often have residual feelings from our loved one’s death. We think about what strength meant to them and to us. During many rounds with an illness, we and our loved ones may often have heard the battle cry, “Be strong and fight the disease!”
We are sure that strong people can beat it. She will make it. Cancer is no match for a strong husband or a fiercely determined wife. The message is that strength is life and death is weakness. So what are we left with when our loved one dies—weakness? Does it mean they weren’t strong enough to make it? Did they succumb? Did they lose the battle? We often are left believing that someone was too weak to fight, so they “succumbed.” Does this mean that they lost and the illness won?
Are we all destined to die as failures?
Just as a woman must be strong enough to give birth, we must have a great deal of strength to die. Some spiritual systems believe that we give our permission to be born into the world, and we give our permission to die.
Over many years of experience in the death and dying field, we have seen the struggle that ensues when a soul is attempting to leave a body. And then there comes that quiet moment of surrender, when strength is about letting go rather than holding on. As you look back at the death, you may see things differently in retrospect. Your loved one was powerful to get through all that he or she did when battling the disease. And they were even more powerful when they finally let go into the unknown, dying into strength, not weakness.
When all is said and done, facing a loss takes an enormous amount of strength and determination that gives meaning to our loss and honors our loved one.
Jan and Jeffrey had been married for ten years. Jeffrey jokes, “We were more married than anyone I’ve ever known. In fact, it seems like we were married from the first day we met.”
One day while they were taking a cruise, Jan felt a pain in her hip when she was exercising. She figured it was a pulled muscle—no big deal—and she continued exercising. When they arrived back home and got settled in, it was a Saturday night and Jan insisted, “Let’s go to the early church service.”
“We go every week, and we just got home,” Jeffrey said, surprised at Jan’s urgency. “I’m sure we could miss one service.”
When the pain of Jan’s pulled leg muscle didn’t go away, she became engrossed in reading about how after the 9/11 tragedy, people were deep in faith and spent lots of time praying. It seemed that her pain medication was doing nothing, and while she waited to return to the doctor, she started reading as much religious material as she could get her hands on. She became fascinated with stories of people who had died, and one day she told her husband, “Jeffrey, I know I’m going to die because my grandmother came to me and said, ‘You will come be with us soon.’ ”
Jan assured Jeffrey that she wasn’t scared, because she had loved her grandmother so much and it was actually comforting.
Jeffrey laughed it off, telling her, “People have visitations on their deathbed, not after a pulled muscle at the gym.”
Jan insisted that she felt God telling her it was okay to die. “That’s why I go to church so much these days,” she explained to Jeffrey, “to hear that it’s okay to die. I need to hear it over and over again.”
Jeffrey said he simultaneously dismissed her thoughts of dying and feared they were true, especially since she had a doctor’s visit coming up because the pain hadn’t gone away. Over the next few weeks, Jeffrey wanted Jan to see a psychiatrist about her belief that she was dying.
“I’m sorry, Jeff,” she said, “but it’s true. I’m going to die. Why else would I be spending so much time in my dreams visiting with deceased family members and friends? I don’t want to go, Jeff, but I know it’s my time.”
After her next medical workup, she was diagnosed with lung cancer that had metastasized to her bones. The doctors told her that it had already advanced so far, there wasn’t much she could do, that she probably had had it for many years. The fact that she was a young nonsmoker had placed her in a low risk category for cancer, so it was unlikely she’d have found out sooner.
For the next month, Jan did her best to comfort Jeffrey. “They came to help me, to get me ready,” she said. “God and I knew long before the doctors did, and I know that it’s going to be okay when I die. I really hope you can find a way to be reassured that we continue on after death and I’ll be there for you when it’s your time. I want you to live a full life after I am gone and to know that wherever I go, I’m not alone.”
After she died, Jeffrey understood it wasn’t that Jan had been attracted to death and religion for the last year of her life; rather, they had come to her to help.
Visitations are a commonly reported afterlife phenomenon. For example, a dying patient has a vision of her mother, who has been dead for twenty years. Her mother tells her that everything will be okay and she will be waiting for her. These things happen a great deal, but modern medicine tries to explain them away, calling them hallucinations brought on by pain medication, or wishful thinking.
But why is the concept of visitation so hard to believe? Imagine that you’re a parent who had loved and cared for your child. You kept her fed, healthy, and safe while she was growing up. You helped her when she skinned her knee, when she was afraid of the dark, when she felt insecure about high school. You shared her excitement and fears of college, marriage, and becoming a parent herself.
Now go forward sixty to eighty years into the future. You’ve been dead for decades, and your daughter, the same one you helped through all her scary moments in life, is now dying herself. Wouldn’t you go meet her if you could? As the veil between life and death is lifting, wouldn’t you want to reassure her she’s going be okay and you’re still there for her? When you think about it that way, maybe it doesn’t sound quite as far-fetched. Many people believe that when they die, everyone they have ever loved and known will be there to greet them in death. That is why they believe no one actually dies alone.
After death, you will also experience a review of your life. You will review it not in the first person, not as you experienced it in life. But you will review it from the perspective of how everyone else experienced you. You will feel all the consequences of your actions. You will know all the pain and more important all the love and kindness that others felt from you. This will be not a punitive experience but a learning one. You will see how far you have grown in your life and whether you have more lessons to learn. You will be asked how much did you love and how much service did you do for mankind.
Whatever the truth about life after death, we are certain that death does not exist as we imagine it. If you feel your loved one’s presence, do not doubt it. They still exist. Birth is not a beginning and death is not an ending. They are merely points on a continuum. Death does not exist in its usually traditional form as an “ending to all.” We are not suggesting that when you lose your loved one, you can skip the terrible pain of loss and separation, but we believe with all our hearts that even in death, our loved one still exists.
On the other hand, there are many in our society who believe that when you die, that is it. There is nothing else, and your energy lives on only in those around you. If this is true, then our loved ones live on in us in an even more tangible way than we thought.
Many societies believe that the body is just a coat, a suit of clothes that we wear during this lifetime. You may have sat by someone’s body after they died and have seen that this was a shell, a cocoon left behind. It was not your loved one anymore. And you could feel this absence of their spirit, their energy. Life continues beyond the death of a physical body. It is only the warmth and calm of a transformation of a cocoon to a butterfly. You don’t see the butterfly, but you feel the relief of knowing that your loved one is no longer in pain, no longer hooked up to tubes and sick in a bed; they are no longer diseased. Your loved one is now free of all that.
Our beliefs in the afterlife play a role in how we grieve, the impact being left to each individual. Questioning it is nothing new. Since the beginning of time, human beings have been concerned with what happens after we die: Where is our loved one now? We thought he was his body, but his body is finished and we can still feel him in our hearts. Exactly when and how did he leave? Even in the moments before death and sometimes for hours or days, we see the body barely breathing, and somehow we know our loved one is no longer inhabiting it.
“I can just feel he’s not here anymore.” We have heard this many times, this sense that the loved one was already absent from his body when he died. Families sit in a circle around a body for days on end, but when their loved one dies, they unconsciously remove their focus from the body. They may suddenly realize they are no longer giving attention to their loved one’s body the way they were before. They must know that on some level, their loved one’s energy is no longer pulling or attracting their attention. The energy has been disbanded.
At the moment of death, we assume that our loved one is in the midst of separating the mortal from the immortal. She is leaving behind the temporary house, her body, and moving into the depth of the spirit and the soul—what many call the “Immortal Self.” It has been reported that at the moment of death, we experience a total absence of panic, fear, or anxiety. We feel the physical wholeness that was missing, like an amputee feeling her severed leg, or a deaf person hearing beautiful music.
Our belief in the afterlife dictates how we feel about someone’s dying. If you believe she will go to heaven, you may be sad she’s gone but reassured that she is happy in heaven. If you believe there is nothing after death, you can derive reassurance that she is no longer suffering. If you believe in reincarnation, you may wonder who she will be next. When will they be born? If you believe in heaven, you will be relieved if she led a good life.
Some feel that our loved ones live on, but on another plane of existence. They may believe a loved one is around but is now transmitting signals, like radio or TV that we in our limited physical world can’t pick up. And yet we long to. We may try to contact the dead, to speak to them and pierce the veil between life and death. It is futile to debate the reality of this, for it is beyond our knowing.
In loss we are looking and longing for connection. The longing for that exploration should be stopped and questioned only if you believe it is being exploited by someone for unscrupulous reasons. If someone says they have experienced it, the only question that is important is, “Were you comforted?”
Whatever you believe, your grief will be tied to how you feel about the afterlife. You may not have any belief about the afterlife but just feel the loss of your loved one here. For some, the afterlife is of no concern. They are just feeling the pain here on earth.
A young boy, Johnny, always passed his church on his way to school. Although he didn’t go in, each day he opened the door to the church and said, “God, it’s me, Johnny.” Then he smiled, closed the door, and went on his way to school.
As he became older, he continued to stick his head in churches for a minute and say, “God, it’s me, Johnny.” When his tenth grade class went on a trip to London during the summer, he opened every unlocked church door and announced his presence to God, smiling as if he was catching him off guard by being in London.
A few years later when he was a high school senior, Johnny was killed in a car accident. But the second before he died, Johnny heard a voice that said, “Johnny, it’s me, God.”
This story was told by a hospice and palliative care nurse who heard it from a nun in Catholic school. It continues to be passed on with a few changes here and there, but it comforts those who hear it with a promise of an afterlife. It seems that whether we believe in heaven, God, reincarnation, or white light, we are comforted by the sense that there is a hereafter, that we are more than bodies and have more than one mortal life with a beginning, a middle, and an end.
The dying experience is similar to that of birth, just as the growth of the caterpillar is the natural step toward emergence of the butterfly. Just as we cannot hear a dog whistle, which sounds at a frequency too high for the human ear, we cannot hear our loved one broadcasting on a channel whose frequency is beyond our ears’ capabilities. But that doesn’t mean that our loved one can’t hear us. A ship exists on the ocean, even if it sails out beyond the limits of our sight. The people in the ship have not vanished; they are simply moving to another shore.
In the same way, death can be viewed as a transition to a higher state of consciousness where you continue to perceive, understand, and grow. The only thing you lose is something that you don’t need anymore, your physical body. It’s like putting away your winter coat when spring comes. You lose something that you don’t need anymore, something that may have been sick, old, and no longer in working order. That understanding may leave little comfort in the immediate moment, but in the long run, it helps to know that somewhere, somehow, our loved one still exists and we will see them again.
The trouble is that in grief, a moment feels like a year and a year feels like an eternity. It has to be easier for the one who has moved into the next reality, where there is no time, even if we see ourselves as a moment behind. Frank and Margaret had been married for fifty wonderful years, over which time they were mostly inseparable. When Margaret became terminally ill, she said, “I can accept this illness. I can accept the reality that I’m going to die. The hardest thing for me to accept is that I’m going to be without Frank.”
As Margaret’s disease progressed, she was more and more disturbed by the prospect of this ultimate separation. Hours before she died, she turned to Frank, who was sitting at her bedside. Her mind was clear and alert, for she had not taken any medications. She said, “I’m going to be leaving soon. And it’s finally okay.”
“What made it okay for you?” he asked.
She replied, “I’ve just been told I’m going to a place where you already are.”
Is it possible that Frank was simultaneously sitting in the hospital room and waiting for his beloved wife in heaven? Perhaps the question revolves around our perception of time. For Frank, who lives and breathes in earth time, it may be five, ten, or twenty years before he sees Margaret again. But if she’s going to a place where there is no time, it may seem that he arrives a second behind her.
There is no doubt that is easier for our loved ones who have died, since there is no time for them. We, on the other hand, are stuck in time, and for us in grief that moment may feel like forever.
Children have no agendas when it comes to the afterlife, which is probably why we hear so many cases in which dying children validate an afterlife. A twelve-year-old child who came back from a near-death experience decided not to tell her mother that dying in a car accident was a beautiful experience. She didn’t want to hurt her mother’s feelings by telling her that she had been happy in a place greater than her home.
She had a need to talk about it, though, so she told her father that dying was a beautiful experience and she had not wanted to come back. In fact, not only was it an experience of light and openheartedness, she had been amazed to meet with someone who said he was her brother, who told her she was going to be fine. “He loved me so much,” she said, “and he loved you and Mom, too. How could I have seen someone who said he was my brother? I don’t have a brother.”
Her father began to cry. “You did have a brother, but he died before you were born,” her dad said. “We wanted to tell you when you got older.”
We often make the mistake of thinking all communication ends at death. Why do we find nothing unusual about talking to an unborn child in utero, but if we talk to the deceased, people might think we’re crazy? The truth is that even after death, it’s never too late to say you’re sorry or how much you loved your spouse or mother or friend. The truth is that you can finish “unfinished business” even if you’ve held on to it for ten, twenty years or even more.
When we die, we will be surprised that not only those who loved us the most will be waiting, but there will also be many others. Ancestors, and strangers whose lives we touched and never knew it. It’s easy to imagine that when we die all our old friends will gather to welcome us to the next world.
Many people believe in reincarnation, that their soul leaves the body and is reborn in another one. It is said that we are reincarnated with the same people over and over, that we come into this world with lessons to learn in the midst of others who have the same task.
We are a society that demands proof for most things, but some things simply cannot be proved. For example, if a friend asked you to touch your nose, you could do that and you would both agree that it was done. It would be the same result if your friend asked you to touch your chin. But if you were asked to touch the love you feel for your child or your parent, what would you touch?
We will all wonder what the afterlife is and what it will be like. Some think the importance lies in the answer. But just the question is enough. What does seem to be important is that the bereaved are comforted by the thought and feeling that their loved one still exists somehow.