NO PERSON’S GRIEF THE SAME
We will take up your grief story in chapter 9. But before we do, it’s important to understand why your narrative will be unlike that of any other human who has ever lived, like a fingerprint or a snowflake. The following list of factors, by no means exhaustive, will be explored more deeply in this chapter and the three to follow.
Environmental triggers This is the term for the people, places, things, scents, and tastes that remind you of the person you lost. You knew your loved one in a physical environment through your senses. A feeling will be associated with every reminder, and no person’s environment is the same.
Personality and character differences Each of you is a unique confluence of nature, nurture, and life experiences, with no two humans designed alike. It follows that every person experiences loss and grief in his or her own way, according to their own unique way of being.
The circumstances of death Suicide, murder, sudden death by accident, or catastrophic health events like strokes or heart attacks introduce trauma, fear, and mental chaos to grieving. The aftermath of such a loss — so-called interruptive death — tends to be accompanied by much more intense experiences and feelings, as compared with the peaceful death of a loved one after a life well lived.
Attachment (or lack thereof) to the deceased In my experience, this is the most important factor. I’ve even developed an equation of sorts: the intensity and duration of your grief depends on your level of attachment to the person you lost. Put simply, what was your relationship to the deceased? How much did you love him or her, and why? Conversely, what was your level of discord or antagonism with the one who died? No two human relationships are the same.
These factors that explain the uniqueness of grief seem self-evident now, but it took me years of grieving and working with the bereaved before I connected the dots. My golden retriever, Lonigan, helped set me on the path of understanding.
It was a fine autumn Saturday in 1986, and I had spent much of the morning happily playing with Kevan and little Connor, our youngest child, who had been born the previous January. When I handed the boys off to their mother, I took up with a list of household chores. At the top was bathing the dog, whose veterinarian had prescribed a disinfectant soap for a skin infection.
I took Lonigan out back, hosed him down, and lathered him up, my mind no doubt on a thousand other things. But after a few seconds, I realized that I felt a surge of sadness and was unexplainably tearful. I sat down in the grass and tried to understand what was happening. The answer took a few seconds but eventually came to me. In the weeks and months after Ryan was born, before Nancy and I could touch or hold him in the intensive care unit, we needed to first scrub up with antiseptic soap. The scent of the soap I used with Lonigan was almost identical to that from the hospital.
That innocent sensory stimulus had cut straight to the place in my brain where the memories and feelings of Ryan would forever be stored. It is called the limbic system, a primitive part of our brain where human emotions are believed to be centered. A sight or smell might register there and is then interpreted and named by more advanced parts of our cognitive apparatus. The pungent aroma of antiseptic soap produced tears, which my brain could eventually link to the hospital.
For the grieving person (and for everyone else), this happens over and over. Smells, sights, or sounds are everywhere — triggers so pervasive and often so subtle that they are impossible to consciously be aware of or to guard against.
If this was true for me, I knew it had to be true for my grieving clients and for the bereaved everywhere. It also followed that every life, every environment is so different that no set of triggers could possibly be the same. Thus, how could every experience of mourning be the same?
Understanding the connection between grief and your environment often provides an important sanity check. Sudden, unexplainable shifts in feelings or states of mind can make a person feel unbalanced. Be assured, you are not losing your mind if the sight of his toothbrush brings tears to your eyes. Or the sound of a stranger’s laughter causes you to freeze. Or perhaps even silence in a moment when you anticipated sound. After all these years of listening to clients describe these types of triggers, I am still amazed at how subtle yet powerful these moments can be.
The following exercise is an inventory of your environment. In your journal, make a list of things in your daily life — sights, scents, sounds, people, and places — that remind you of the one you lost. These ideas will later become important elements in your story of loss.
• Did you share a favorite restaurant?
• Did he have a favorite toy? A favorite song? A favorite flower? A favorite sports team? A favorite season of the year?
• Are his books still in the bookcase as he arranged them?
• Can you still smell her scent in her closet?
• Are his golf clubs still in the garage?
• Are you aware of how quiet and empty the house now seems?
• What is your favorite photograph of the person you lost?
• What was it like the first time you went back to church after the funeral?
• What did you feel when you went through her clothes?
Add your own questions, based on your own environment and life with the one you lost. A hardware store, if you and your deceased father went there regularly for lawn fertilizer and garden tools, can be a powerful emotional trigger. The theme music of her favorite television show. The smell of laundry detergent.
When I took my own inventory, I recalled my first trip back to the hospital after Ryan was released. I was going to visit a friend who had just given birth. My stomach tumbled and my eyes welled the moment I stepped off the elevator into the maternity ward, which perplexed me at the time. But no wonder.
The transition from winter to spring has also always inspired melancholy. Springtime was when we finally brought Ryan home. Summer was my first season of anguish.
The autumn Ryan was born, Nancy had planted morning glories outside our home. The sight of those flowers will forever cause a moment’s ache in my heart.
Eddie Rabbit’s song “I Love a Rainy Night” was a hit the year of Ryan’s birth. In the weeks after we had him home, I sang it to Ryan. I held him and danced. Tears come when I hear that silly song, even now.
A new dishwashing soap came out that spring when he was home, and that scent is forever connected with him. We still use that brand, and there is a twinge every time we clean the kitchen.
Every Saturday morning, on my way to meet a friend at a local diner for breakfast, I drive by the house where we lived when we brought Ryan home. When I pass by, I look at the porch where we sat to look at birds and butterflies, and I remember with a mixture of sadness, wonder, and gratitude.
Other children were also constant reminders. Several friends had kids Ryan’s age, and I could not see them without longing for my son and trying to imagine him as a five- or six-year-old boy. That continues today, with something as innocuous as seeing a man in his mid-thirties with a son at a ballgame or rolling down the aisle at the supermarket. Ryan would likely be married and have a family of his own by now. I will forever mourn the fact that my son never had the chance.
For some reason, when the date of his birth or the date of his death line up with the day of the week when those events occurred, I find myself replaying every detail much more than I would otherwise. The mystery of triggers.
The inventory of your environment will probably be painful. It was for me. But breathe deep and reassure yourself that the feelings are okay. Sadness, confusion, anger, and yearning — no feeling is wrong. They all connect you to the one you lost.
Finally, try to be more aware of the triggers as you go through your day, reminding yourself that there is a reason tears come up or your breathing catches.
Helping my clients understand how environment affects mourning is a big part of my role as a grief therapist. In our first session, Brenda told me she felt like she was literally suffocating.
“Am I losing my mind?” she asked.
She wasn’t.
Brenda and Fred had been married for ten years when he was killed in a traffic accident. They had begun each day sharing coffee before heading off to different jobs, but they spoke every few hours on the telephone. They trained dogs together, took dance lessons, enjoyed several favorite restaurants, and had all of the same friends. Except for her cubicle at work, there was not one physical space in Brenda’s life that her husband did not share. Every place in their house, every step along the jogging trail, inspired yearning for her husband.
“You didn’t love Fred in a bubble,” I told her. “You loved him in a physical world full of sights, smells, sounds, and memories. That’s why this is so intense all the time. You were never not together. Your lives were beautifully entwined.”
Brenda was relieved she was not losing her mind. Normalizing this aspect of loss removes a great emotional burden. By understanding that reality of grieving, she could also make conscious choices about what to do with so much environmental stimuli. Brenda decided to remain in the home she and Fred had shared. To lose so many of the reminders of him would have seemed like another death. She could now embrace their shared world with a sense of peace, even when doing so was painful.
I also see people like Frank, a thirty-year-old man who came to me feeling confused and guilty. His concern was not feeling overwhelmed by the death of his father, but just the opposite. He was underwhelmed and wanted to know why.
At one time, I would have assumed he was repressing his feelings, and I would have put him through exercises to access them. But by the time he came to me, I had developed a different understanding.
Frank told me his parents had separated when he was three, and his dad had then moved to the West Coast. Frank didn’t see his dad until his adolescent years and then only for a few weeks in the summer. Nor did Frank see his father much as an adult. Frank could go days without anything in his environment reminding him of his dead parent. Frank said he loved his father but shared very little time in the same space. Frank expected to feel more afflicted with sorrow, a cultural assumption of what a son should feel when his dad died; he was relieved that the absence of sadness did not mean he was an unfeeling person.