Don't Try to Fix Me, My Grief Doesn't Mean I'm Broken

Death is no stranger to me. Its process and presence in my life has molded me since I was in the 3rd grade. 

When my childhood friend group buried one of our own by suicide – our second male suicide in 6 years and before the age of 20 –  I distinctly remember looking at Cameron, lifelong friend and fabulous Austinite Jew, and lamenting on the frustration and sadness of the knowing that we were confident what to roughly expect with the grief following the funeral. 

All of us, again, would be thrown back into the whirlpool of confusion, despair, loneliness, anger, pain, disorganization and reorganization, and meaning-making with some final goal of acceptance, which I just consider as integration. Many of us weren’t necessarily ‘recovered’ from the first death, and to stand there with the same group of faces wearing the same color black, again, felt unjust. The second death would not impact everyone the same, nor equally, nor am I attempting to portray the two deaths and their corresponding community’s grieving processes as the same, because they’re not. (Despite both being successful, young males who led virtually similar archetypal lives in the form of white, popular, Christian, conservative, middle class, brought up, for the most part, in my school zone. I will write a whole thinkpiece on this bit, but this is not that). 

I had some common and ‘expected’ death experiences in childhood – the loss of elderly family in grandfather, ‘PawPaw’, and great-grandmother, ‘Howdy’ (how Texan of me). I never met my paternal grandmother, Peggy, and my Swedish paternal grandfather, Fafa, died when I was two. I remember my grandfather’s funeral as large – a testament to the relationships made from his career, recovery community involvement, and participation in the University of Texas Texas Exes alumni group). The memories I have from my great-grandmother’s funeral focus more on the tribute to her 94 years of living and all that she had witnessed in her life. I was in 3rd and 6th grade, respectively.    

Consequences from my drinking led me to stop for 3 years at age 18 (and then for good at age 23) and get involved in nonprofit advocacy for mental health and recovery. Many of my peers and friends were young people in recovery. Some of them are still sober, even fewer of them, including my step-brother, are still alive. I was told that if I planned to get involved in recovery communities as a participant, employee, or caregiver, that I should buy a funeral dress, that I was more likely to bury someone in this recovery world than otherwise. And I have buried many of those lost to the syringe or pill bottle.  

I pursued chaplaincy in the US Air Force Reserves and ministry at a church in Denver in my mid-20s. Between military and hospice ministry, I was exposed to care for those with life-changing combat injuries, and the actively-dying. I learned to be a solid anchor for others in those sacred moments between life and death, and the times when part of life died but not necessarily a person. I became attuned to the wide-breadth of grief reactions and feelings, learning that the cold, stoic approach of one family member does not mean they care less than the family member screaming and throwing items in the hospital hallway (nor does someone’s dramatic response mean they care more). I learned how people reach for religion, tarot, past-life regression, mysticism, exercise, literature and the arts, with the same intensity and despair as others who cope using drugs, sex, diet, shopping, travel and work. I learned the critical need for a respectful and caring funeral, as I watched some examples of how funerals can also be uncomfortable and unhelpful for the grieving. 

When I grieved the deaths of my uncle and pastor, both middle-aged, otherwise healthy men who died by widow-maker heart attack and rare cancer, respectively, I recognized how death shook up a family unit dependent on their patriarch. I was 28, and the lens of family and future planning gave me a perspective to the loss of someone as both grieving the human relationship loss, and the loss of the tool of utility that the lost person provided within the family’s context.  

I’ve cried and grieved with women who have terminated their pregnancies. I’ve cried and grieved with women who miscarried. I’ve cried and grieved with people who lost their jobs, homes, health, finances, and marriages. 

I’ve spent hours with those wheelchair bound or otherwise disabled, angry that society has a weird fantasy that disabled people are supposed to inspire us. (Against all odds of this absolutely unethical and screwed American healthcare system, a disabled person is here to inspire you). It’s awesome when they do, but we should be cognizant to refrain from adding anything that benefits us to someone’s plate.   

I’ve bore witness to the Black community in their systemic grief.

I’ve bore witness to the LGBT community in their systemic grief.

I’ve bore witness to the Native community in their systemic grief.

I’ve bore witness to the female community in their systemic grief.

I’ve gone through a divorce and job/financial loss myself. 

Grief is simultaneously universal, yet hyper individualistic. Grieving spouses don’t all share the same grief. Grief is not only about the death of the person or the relationship, but the realization that a part of the grieving person died, too. An entire storyline, routine, and world has been obliterated.  

It’s humbling to enumerate the cases for grief and sadness. A solemn reminder that finding pain and suffering is endless. In perpetuity, the one thing we can comfortably expect from life is that we will be made uncomfortable. 

Grief has taught me how much life and relationships matter. But I don’t want to talk about life as much as I want to comment on the reactions to the grieving that the living offer. Much of the reactions are well-meaning, but I want to offer a dark-side to what I have said, heard, and experienced from being in the realm of grief all too often. 

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The repeated exposure to the grief process and my willingness to go back to it in the form of caregiving means that I am also familiar with the feelings of dealing with other people in the midst of grief.  

People mean well when they offer their condolences and words of attempted solace and connection: 

‘All of this is happening for a reason’, 

‘You’ll be better/stronger for this’,

‘God called You for a special purpose for this’,

‘God needed another angel’

‘Have you read Jeremiah 1:5?’

For those that hear these phrases and feel better, I am not talking to you. These words are sufficient to influence your feelings and there is no issue with them. However, if your needs are met with these theological phrases, please do not judge those whose needs are not met with what they consider platitudes.

For those that hear these phrases and have felt wrong or rude or bad for being angry about them but couldn’t explain why, howdy hi yes you’re my audience. 

It’s okay to be angry at people’s methods of delivering their well-intentioned condolences. It’s okay to be angry that you’re in a situation that needs to receive condolences. It’s okay that not a single thing you have read, listened to, seen, or heard has given you any sort of real comfort in the midst of your grief. Let us be clear that all emotions are okay, but who and where we express these emotions require discretion.

I want to validate this frustration. I want to validate why these don’t land right. 

Like, 

What’s the operating theology? 

That we suffer for personal development, ordained by a deity or otherwise?

I don’t want to be told that we undergo extreme pain for the sake of character refinement. 

I don’t want to tell someone grieving:

‘Hey, sorry your reality got f*cked up. Upside is, you’re gonna be, like, way more compassionate when this is all over.’ 

Like, okay? At age 16, I won the Kiwanis Volunteer of the Year Award for Texas and Oklahoma. You’re gonna tell me I wasn’t compassionate enough? That God needed me to feel all these things to be able to have more compassion and utility for everyone else who felt those things, too? The implication is that I couldn’t recognize that life is hard and be able to care for others without experiencing their situation. 

???????

I don’t want to be told that the reason I experienced what I experienced is so I can better help others, and better be a servant of God. Find someone else to be a hero. I already volunteer and help others. This isn’t a character trait that I was lacking or insufficient in.  

You’re gonna tell me that God and I saved my life at 18 while my friend’s parent’s buried their 19-year-old son because I’m special to God somehow (between the lines implying, that their child wasn’t)? 

At some point, theological responses fail to hold me together. Did God ‘need another angel’ and divinely plan for this event to happen, or is the cosmic chaotic randomness of death and harm just a part of the cost of being alive in a natural world that is inherently dangerous and risky? 

And if it is all chaos, how does one develop and self-assign the necessary order and structure that give our lives direction and meaning? Where is the internal belief system that manifests and reacts to an entire external lifestyle when that very real, very habitual, very safe external lifestyle falls apart? 

Is the expectation or hope that ‘we all die peacefully of old age’, and anything short of that means humans will determine something went wrong and need intense rationalization and reorganization? Is it that simple and trite? 

It doesn’t feel good to those in the midst of grief to hear that ‘shit happens’, ‘life isn’t supposed to be fair’ either. 

A majority of the pain in the transrational experience of grief is the lack of any rational and comprehensive answer. Something nonsensical happened to us, and now our entire mechanism of logic we use to navigate life has been turned on its head. The mental map is gone, eroded. The arguments and frames of existence don’t hold up. Fantasies of the future are dead. No words can comfort what could only be comforted by the lost. 

The truth is, that a lot of the words we have told others have caused unintentional harm or diminish the person’s pain. You, the caring person, just want to make me not feel bad anymore. Feeling bad is now the operating, solvable, current problem, not the initial monstrosity I’m upset about, and if you, a caring person, can help that, then you made a difference, right? 

People aren’t wrong. They were never wrong to want to comfort the grieving with Scripture, theology, or other sources of comfort. But let’s check our own philosophy on grief: is grief a problem to be solved? If it is not, then what is the caregiver’s role in the emotional moment? 

If someone being upset makes me uncomfortable, and I try to use words to explain away the pain and offer hope so that they stop displaying uncomfortable emotion, was I really serving them or myself? What if their pain wasn’t a problem to be solved, but my discomfort with them having pain in front of me was? 

I looked for nights on end for Scripture, spiritual, scientific, and philosophical reasons that could articulate to me precisely why I suffered what I suffered. 

The goal wasn’t even to have an answer, really. The goal was just to feel better. Give me something to make it make sense so my brain can stop clawing and chewing, so my soul can feel stabilized and regulated. Just make these feelings stop. But my desired answers weren’t there. 

And they weren’t there in Eckhart Tolle or Brene Brown, either, because no one has any satisfactory answer as to why horrible, unfair and tragic things happen, except that they just do, and to trust in the Mystery. 

We feel responsible to others to not let people stay sad. The problem is you can't heal somebody's pain by trying to take it away from them, regardless of the compassionate feeling of duty to do so. Feeling the feelings and walking through the grief is a necessity of the process of grief. There’s no talking someone out of grief, there’s only loving someone through it. 

If in the moment we want to offer a theological response to explain away the pain, let us pause and consider if perhaps simply sitting, listening, and bearing witness to someone’s pain is sufficient. That asking questions, or validating, is perfectly acceptable. This is not doing nothing – shutting our mouths can be a form of harm-reduction. Many times, it is in the sitting and witnessing and anchoring that we provide the space for the grieving person’s feelings to flow and pass, rather than stop or stifle them. 

This requires strength. This requires humility. This requires allowing someone to fall apart without the urgency and action of saving them. This goes against many of our instincts to comfort or protect. This goes against the ego’s desire to not feel inadequate. 

But we are inadequate in the face of grief. Words and actions are often inadequate in the wake of emotions. 

People don’t need to be saved from their feelings, they need to feel them safely. 

When experiencing life has become volatile for someone, be the solid anchor. 

Everything happens for a reason, and I won’t pretend to know that reason. I just know you can weather that storm.