THE WAY FORWARD THROUGH STORIES
The year was 1986. I had grave doubts about the stages of grief but had yet to turn my back on them completely. I had nothing else to fall back on, was groping around for a way to help my grieving clients, and was still trying to come to terms with my own lingering heartache.
Scott was a turning point.
At the time, it was a rare guy courageous enough to consult a shrink, and Scott was a strapping, thirty-five-year-old construction worker. He and his father had worked side by side in the family business for eighteen years; that partnership ended the day the older man suffered a fatal heart attack. Six months later, Scott came to see me at his wife’s urging. When he sat down in my office, he looked like he would rather have a root canal. I’m sure he thought I would light incense and break into a chant.
“Dad would turn over in his grave,” he said. “My wife and pastor said I should come. It wasn’t my idea.”
“Why do they think you need to be here?” I said.
“My wife says I’m irritable and drinking too much,” he said. “They both say they’re worried about me.”
“Do they have reason to be?” I said.
“I don’t think so,” he said. “But I have been hitting the bottle a little too hard since Dad died. And I’m not very focused at work.”
“I get it,” I said. “But we won’t go forward if you don’t want to, unless you’re open to at least giving this a shot.”
“That’s fair enough, I guess,” he said.
Although I had serious doubts about the stages of grief, I thought there was a chance Scott might be able to relate to them, like a blueprint on a construction site.
“People tend to go through stages when they’ve had a loss,” I said, listing them. “You might be dealing with some anger and depression. That’s pretty normal. We could try to figure out where you are with that.”
Scott didn’t bite.
“Sounds like mumbo jumbo,” he said.
“Come to think of it, maybe it is,” I said.
“So now what?”
“You said your dad would turn over in his grave,” I said. “Why is that?”
“He was one tough fella,” he said. “You should have known him.”
For the next forty-five minutes, he spoke nonstop.
“He came from hard times. Nobody ever gave him anything,” Scott said. “But from the time he was a kid, he wanted to own a business — and sure enough, he built ours with his own sweat and blood.”
Scott’s dad was his Little League coach. He taught his son how to hunt and fish.
“In high school, I got caught stealing some beer,” Scott said. “My dad let me sit in jail that night. The next morning, he put me out with the guys unloading cement bags from a boxcar. For a month he made me sweep floors and clean the toilets at the office. He never said two words to me the whole time.
“Then one day he comes and says, ‘It’s about time you decide whether you’re going to be a man or a thug.’”
“So you chose,” I said.
“I chose,” he said. “The beer was never mentioned again.”
I was torn as I listened. I felt a little inadequate because I hadn’t persuaded him that the stages might be useful. I was still looking for clues about where Scott was with his grief. I was tempted to interrupt him, to guide him back to his “grief work.” It was my job, after all, to get him less impatient, less angry, and to curtail the alcohol. It occurred to me that Scott was trying to avoid his feelings by telling me his story, but he would not be deterred. I had no real choice but to sit back and let him talk. He was a natural storyteller and seemed to gather momentum as the minutes ticked by.
“I’m sorry,” I said finally. “We’re out of time.”
He seemed disappointed.
“We could finish the next time,” I said. “That is, if you want to come back.”
“I guess I could,” he said.
A week later Scott picked up where he left off. He remembered how after high school, he decided to go work for his dad.
“One day ten years later, he called me into his office,” Scott said. “I wondered what I had done this time. Instead he said, ‘It’s about time you take your proper place here. From now on, you and I will be co-owners.’ He shook my hand and told me to get back to work. It was the proudest day of my life.”
Scott and his dad had their share of arguments but always resolved them.
“We were always competing,” Scott told me, a wistful smile on his face. “Shooting the deer with the biggest rack. Catching the biggest fish. Betting on football and basketball games. The loser had to buy the first beer the next time we were in the bar. But he never kept track. He always bought the first one.”
“And I remember how he was always so patient with customers,” Scott said. “As tough as he was, he had really good people skills. The customer was always right, even though many times they were just plain wrong. He and I would argue about that. I wanted to charge more when people made unreasonable demands or changed their minds about a paint color. My dad reminded me that the next job might come from the last one. ‘A positive recommendation was more important than proving a customer wrong.’”
Then Scott paused, seeming to brace himself for what came next. The telephone call. The emergency room.
“He was gone by the time I got there,” Scott said. “He was laying there with these wires attached to him. His eyes were closed. But that wasn’t my dad. He was up with the sun every day and could outwork ten men and now . . . nothing. I felt the room start to spin, but I had to snap out of it because my mother was holding onto my arm and she was a basket case. I had to keep it together for her. I’ve always had to keep it together.”
Finally, Scott couldn’t talk at all because of his weeping. I thought, “There are no theories or diagnoses needed here. Scott is doing exactly what he needs to do.”
Telling his story was his therapy.
Not long after I met Scott, I remembered a similar experience of my own, just a few weeks after Ryan’s death. I had reached out to a locally respected pastoral counselor, a quiet, dignified gentleman about twenty years older than me. As we sat down, he told me how sorry he was for my loss. I thanked him but quickly came to my agenda. I wanted him to tell me how he thought I was doing with my grief. He gently steered me in another direction.
“Tell me about Ryan and we can go from there,” he said. “Start wherever you’d like.”
So I talked first about my son’s precarious birth and six months in the hospital, followed by the joy of his homecoming and the devastation of his death. It was the first time I had told the story of Ryan from beginning to end to someone I didn’t know. I didn’t get more than a few words out before I began to cry.
The counselor said very little, just nodded and occasionally asked clarifying questions. I could feel his compassion in the power of his attention and presence, the empathy in his eyes and in his expression. Instead of theories or therapeutic interventions, he offered deep human connection — and affirmation. He told me I was doing fine with my grief.
I saw that kindly man three or four times and felt great comfort each time. It was such a blessing to have a place to speak so openly of Ryan, to express my sorrow in such a pure and uninhibited way. It was lovely to be listened to like that. But at the time, I minimized the benefits of our sessions because resolution — both for me as a grieving father and for my clients — had been the goal.
After Scott, however, I became less concerned with moving my clients to closure. More and more I found myself attempting to emulate that gentle counselor, trying to listen actively and with empathy. I was increasingly content to have clients lead me, not the other way around. I simply encouraged them to tell their stories.
Time after time, as the stories poured out, so did their pure feelings of sorrow and often of love and gratitude. It soon dawned on me that, through their stories, my clients were being liberated from external rules or expectations and thus could grieve in a much more natural way.
As I listened to my clients’ stories, the following sort of questions naturally came up — questions that didn’t interrupt the flow of the story but that naturally took it deeper in spots.
“What was it like for you the day he was born?”
“How did you meet?”
“Do you have a favorite memory?”
“When was she happiest?”
“What made him sad?”
“How did you learn your sister had died?”
“When was the last time you talked to your father?”
“What did it feel like to hold her hand when she died?”
I asked clients to bring photographs and keepsakes to stimulate their remembering. It was wonderful when a bereaved person could spend fifty minutes remembering just one Christmas. In the past, I would have considered all of it a waste of time, a distraction from “grief work.” But no longer.
Over the years, the bereaved have typically come to see me when they believe they should be feeling better than they are after a loss — generally, six months to a year. In a sense, they come looking for a cure. No wonder some clients are skeptical, even disappointed, when I introduce them to my “story listening” method and suggest that their grief might not come to a predictable and efficient end. This is particularly true of those who come to see me soon after a traumatic loss of disorienting intensity.
Mary, who you met in the introduction, definitely wasn’t there to tell her story; she was there to discuss her symptoms. In our first session, I asked her to put them aside and tell me about her infant daughter.
“How is that going to help me?” she asked.
“Trust me. It’s just important for me to hear,” I said.
She paused.
“Okay,” she said finally. “Where do I start?”
“How about at the beginning,” I said. “Start with your pregnancy.”
“If you say so,” she said.
Mary had been delighted to learn she was pregnant and had big dreams for the daughter she named Stephanie. Mary stayed home with her daughter for the first three months of Stephanie’s life and later found a comfortable balance between motherhood and her busy life as a professional. Mary’s full day included feeding Stephanie before work, then bathing and feeding her at night, and rocking her to sleep with classical music playing softly in the background. That last one was a moment that Mary looked forward to all day.
“That first smile,” she said. “If I live to be a hundred, I won’t forget it. We were in her nursery. I had just changed her diaper; as I bent over to kiss her forehead, there it was. At first I thought I was imagining it, but I could see it in her eyes. She didn’t have the words to say it, but my little girl loved me as much as I loved her.”
Mary paused, working up to what she wanted to tell me next.
“It was a Saturday, a beautiful fall day. I had put Stephanie in the stroller for a walk around the block. I fed her when we got home and put her down for her usual nap. My husband was watching football. I thumbed through a magazine and dozed off myself. It wasn’t an hour after I laid her down that I went to peek in on her. I could tell something was wrong. Her color was off. I screamed for my husband. When he got there, we realized she wasn’t breathing.”
Mary’s hands were shaking as she rubbed her eyes, trying to fight off tears. So much of what she described next was achingly familiar — beginning CPR while her husband called for help; surrendering her daughter to an emergency crew; the drive behind the ambulance to the hospital. She described the hospital waiting room down to the furniture’s color.
“My husband and I were sitting there, staring at the door, and finally it swung open,” she said. “There was another man with our doctor. He introduced himself as the hospital chaplain. That’s when I knew.”
“We ended up in another room,” she continued. “I don’t even know how we got there. But the chaplain reached down into the little crib and handed Stephanie to me.”
That’s when Mary’s defenses crumbled and she began to sob. The intensity of her pent-up emotions took her breath away and seemed to frighten her.
“You’re fine,” I said. “Just try to breathe. Take your time.”
“It’s still like a dream. It doesn’t seem real,” she said when the spasms of sadness had run their course. She slumped in her chair. “I didn’t think it was possible to love so much. And just like that . . . What a cruel world!”
I nodded.
“Now what?” she said.
“You don’t need to know the answer to that right now,” I said.
“I’ve never talked about what happened, at least not like this, the whole story,” she said. “I’ve never cried like that, either.”
“I think it’s good that you did,” I said.
“It’s funny, but it seems that I love Stephanie as much right now as the day she was born,” Mary said as more tears spilled down her cheek. “But what’s wrong with me. It’s been six months. Why am I so sad?”
“I think you just answered that question yourself,” I said.
“What do you mean?”
“You’re sad because of how much you love your daughter. Your feelings are exactly as they are meant to be. You’re not stuck. You’re not depressed. You’re not behind in your grief. You are mourning because you loved her.”
“My precious Stephanie. I’ll always miss her.”
“I’ll always miss my little boy,” I said. “I don’t think we want that to end.”
Mary pondered that for a moment.
“No, we don’t,” she said.
In the months to come, Mary more deeply embraced her narrative of grief and the feelings that came with it. Each session brought new memories — some of them joyful, others agonizing. She said she was still deeply sad but felt less tired. She joined a support group. She was still a hard-charging, upbeat professional, but at my suggestion, she took time each day to connect with her daughter — to look at photographs, touch Stephanie’s blanket, and let the feelings come as they may.
The relief, the liberation, the love I saw in Mary became so common in my office. Gone was the performance-based grief work that promised resolution but that generally produced only frustration and more pain. By turning to stories instead, clients could experience their lives without the fear that they were going crazy.
“This is how it’s supposed to go for you,” I would tell them. “Let’s just see where you are.”
That reassurance was often all a person needed. I might never see a client again after that watershed moment. There is no question that when closure or resolution was no longer the goal, when clients were convinced they were not getting their grief wrong, their need for therapy abated or disappeared altogether.
Clients who had suffered a particularly traumatic loss tended to stay in therapy longer. (More on that in a later chapter.) Others continued to find my office the only safe place for their stories to be told and listened to. I worked with grieving children for more than thirty years. Many of the youngsters I saw at the ages of six through twelve would come back as teenagers or even as adults to update their stories with evolved language and new questions. As they reached new life stages, it was natural for them to wonder, as I did with Ryan, how their lives would have been different had their loved ones lived.
Many adults also return to my office to bring me into the current realities of their loss narrative. Some need reassurance that a surge of pain years later is normal. Some need to discuss life events, remarriage, or new losses.
When loss is a story and there is a safe place to tell it, a lovely bond develops between the teller of the story and the one who receives the story. I am always appreciative and humbled by the fact that so many clients come back years — or even decades — after their initial loss to ask for my help in reconnecting with their ongoing story.
My practice thus evolved from one of a grieving therapist who promoted modern grief theories to one of a grieving therapist/companion/listener/story encourager. It’s not an exaggeration to say that, over time, my clients and I redefined the nature of “successful” grieving. Grief wasn’t getting over loss; it was learning to live with it and to use the grief narrative as a way to preserve a bond with the one who died. My clients made the liberating shift from thinking we must be angry or depressed or in denial to accepting that we may have those experiences.
If that liberation could come for my clients, I realized that it would also come for me. Through my clients’ narratives of grief, I slowly opened up to a deeper appreciation and embrace of my own. It was like I became the gentle narrator of the story of Ryan’s loss, rather than the suspicious mental health professional diagnosing a potential problem. As had been the case with my clients, embracing my story didn’t remove my suffering; instead, it transformed it, made it more pure and simple by removing the fear that I was doing it wrong.
I was free to observe my feelings, day by day, without shame or judgment and without trying to fit them into a theory. Once my interior monologue might have gone like this: “I’m sad today. It’s been more than a year. That seems excessive. What’s wrong with me?” After I relaxed into my story, this is more likely how it would go: “Ryan would have been thirty-six in two months. I’m sad he is not here.”
All the labeling and analysis implied that my sadness was a symptom. But it wasn’t. Once I might have asked myself, “I’m happy today. Does that mean I’m not missing him? Am I repressing my loss? How can I be happy when he’s not here?” That became, “I’ll always miss my son, but it feels great to laugh again.”
Finally, I realized that all the analysis was competing for space with my love. When I stopped judging my mourning, so much love, intimacy, and grace flowed back into my heart. There was so much bittersweet joy in reconnecting to the love.
This moment was almost always the turning point for my clients as well — the moment when they came to understand that their grief was a function of their love. Who could argue with that? How could there be shame in their sorrow? How could their feelings be wrong? How could their feelings do anything but connect them with the ones they missed? The feelings, painful as they might be, were honoring. They were affirming. Grief could be something to be grateful for.
Once I had been haunted by these questions: What’s wrong with my clients? What’s wrong with me? What a relief to realize that there was nothing wrong with any of us. We were not crazy. We were not wallowing.
Clients would ask, “How long will this take?”
And I would reply, “How deeply did you love?”
Because of what I experienced with my clients and as a grieving father, I now subscribe to a school of thought that could not be more different from the prescriptive, achievement-oriented models. It is called “continuing bonds.”
Continuing Bonds: New Understandings of Grief was published in 1996.1 The authors, Dennis Klass, Phyllis R. Silverman, and Steven Nickman, were researchers and clinicians who realized that what they were hearing from grieving families and individuals in real settings was inconsistent with the modern grief models. They studied diaries of the bereaved from the nineteenth century, grieving rituals from other cultures, and the behavior of grieving and adopted children; they also interviewed bereaved parents in support groups. Their findings were similar to my own: in grievers, there was a pervasive and deep longing for connection to the one they lost and great resistance to the idea of ending their emotional attachment to the deceased. They wrote:
[W]e were observing phenomena that could not be accounted for within the models of grief that most of our colleagues were using. It appeared that what we were observing was not a stage of disengagement, which we were educated to expect, but rather, we were observing people altering and then continuing their relationship to the lost or dead person. Remaining connected seemed to facilitate both adults’ and children’s ability to cope with the loss and the accompanying changes in their lives. These “connections” provided solace, comfort and support and eased the transition from the past to the future.2
The idea of continuing bonds removes the imperative to “achieve closure,” “get over,” “move on,” or “let go.” That, in turn, lessens the shame that so many people feel when they think they are not getting grief right.
The authors noted, “While the intensity of the relationship with the deceased may diminish with time, the relationship does not disappear. We are not talking about living in the past, but rather recognizing how bonds formed in the past can inform our present and our future.”3
Continuing bonds concedes the reality that the pain of loss is likely to linger in some form. The bereaved are thus encouraged to redefine, not end, their relationship with the deceased. It is not a how-to model like many theories; rather, it is more consistent with how humankind grieved before psychology and cultural forces co-opted the landscape.
The continuing bonds theory hasn’t (yet) gained enough traction to supplant the popular stages or how-to models. But someday it will, and I hope this book is part of the return to a grieving that is more natural, authentic, and humane.