Good Grief

Grief actually isn’t good or bad. It just is. It’s one of the tools that helps us through the transition from how things used to be to how they are now. Grief is about loss. Real or imagined. Understanding a few things about loss can help our walk through grief to feel a little less cement footed. Everyone experiences grief in their own way. There is no one correct way to grieve. When my sister died I gained some weight. I told my mother I knew how much grief weighted. Exactly 10 pounds. At least that’s how much my grief weighed. They were a very dense 10 pounds. Grief always involves huge emotions regardless of whether they are expressed — loudly or quietly, or suppressed, sadly or angrily, or both. Speaking of anger. There’s always anger. It often comes with a side salad of guilt about being angry. Some of us feel like victims. Some of us act as if it’s more difficult to be the survivor than the one who has died or walked away, or even the one we chose to leave. Who’s to say if that’s true or not. We all live in our own stories on the particular page we happen to be on at the moment.

Here are five things to consider when you are grieving. They have helped me more than once. Perhaps you will find one or more of them to be useful for you. I hope so.

FRAMING:

Many years ago I chose to go into debt so I could spend the first five years of my son’s life at home with him. I was a single mom. I ended up owing quite a lot. One evening after my son was in bed I thought about how much I owed and estimated how long it would take me to pay it all back. I wasn’t looking at the actual numbers. It was a bit unpleasant to think about but it felt manageable. The next evening I took out all the papers — this was pre digital records — and I added it all up. My estimate had been almost spot on, but I panicked. It happened while I was washing the dinner dishes. I stopped. Dried my hands and told myself to stop it. I reminded myself that nothing had changed other than the act of seeing the actual numbers. This was my first introduction to framing.

I waited a long time for my son to be born. Several marriages. One husband with a vasectomy. Artificial insemination attempts. Then finally a very fertile partner and a quick slide into pregnancy. I adored my son. Even more so because I had him later in life than I had hoped. One day I looked at him and realized I could lose him. He could die. I couldn’t imagine how I would go on if he did. I told myself that if the worst happened I would have to tell myself how lucky I was to have had him in my life for as long as we were given. I know. Easy to say. Almost impossible in real life and what do I know, I’ve never had to experience it. But I thought about it. It made me cherish every day with him.

Now let’s talk about gloves. It sounds irreverent to talk about lost gloves when we are discussing the grief of losing someone we love but stay with me for a moment. I had a pair of gloves, blue leather with orange stitching. They had been my mother’s. My mother isn’t dead but she has dementia and it often feels as if she has already mostly left. I treasured the gloves. They were the only gloves of hers that fit me. My hands are bigger. The gloves were the perfect weight for fall and early spring. My mother didn’t need them anymore living in a memory center in a southern state. Besides she hadn’t ever worn them much because they were too big for her. I lost the gloves when I went to visit my son. I was sad for a minute. Then I remembered framing. I had worn those gloves so many times. I enjoyed the hell out of those gloves. I was sad they were gone but I was grateful that I had gotten to wear them. I practiced on those gloves for the day when I would lose someone else I loved. Those gloves were my starter pack. I didn’t dwell on it being unfair or feel that the gods had targeted me. I chose not to feel like a victim. I know. It was just a pair of gloves. But not really. They meant a lot to me. Still. Just gloves. But again, a good place to start.

WHAT WE REALLY MISS:

Loss isn’t just about what is gone. It’s also about there being no more possibility for us to have what we had hoped would be. A woman leaves the house with her children. She pretends to walk them to school. She has her purse. They have their school backpacks and lunches. Secretly the mother takes them to the bus station where they board a bus headed to another state. Their destination is a shelter for abused women. The children’s father frequently beat the woman. Badly. He hadn’t touched the children yet but there were signs he would soon. Signs she was unwilling to ignore. She feared for her life. He controlled all the money. She got on the bus with only the week’s grocery money in her wallet. She was brave. She was also sad. Don’t get me wrong she was relieved when she and her children arrived at a place where they could get help. A place no one, especially her husband, knew about. So why was she sad? She was grieving for the marriage and the family life she had always dreamt she would have. No one gets married expecting a nightmare. She knew things with her children’s father would never have gotten better, only worse. That’s why she left. She was safe. Her babies were safe. But the possibility of things ever getting better with her husband was dead now. Her leaving made sure of that. It also probably saved them all.

It’s really difficult to lose a parent or grandparent we are super close to, but it can be even more difficult to lose one we are estranged from or don’t get along with. Why? Because the possibility of ever receiving love or approval from them is gone. For good. Completely. We mourn the death of what we had hoped would be.

I remember watching this one scene in the movie, “Agnes of God” where a nun is crying because her periods have stopped. They stopped naturally due to menopause. Nuns aren’t allowed to have sex. They don’t get pregnant, at least they’re not supposed to. It’s part of the deal they make to become nuns. Another character, a woman, asks why the nun is crying. When the woman is told that the nun is crying about no longer having menstrual periods, she is confused. She comments that the nun was never planning to have children anyway. The mother superior (or perhaps it was just an older nun, this is all based on an old memory), says something to the effect of: “Yes, but now the possibility is gone.”

BEADS ON A STRING:

Everyone goes through a process of emotions when they grieve. Again, there is no one right way to do this. Imagine the moments we go through during grief as beads on a string. Sometimes the bead is huge. It might be a happy huge bead filled with good memories and warm feelings of love. It could be instead a huge bead of devastation. LOSS drowning us completely in that moment. It could be a smaller bead representing a less intense and shorter lived version of either of these things. We may end up with multiple huge beads in a row or smaller beads spaced further apart. There will also be portions of our grief necklace that are nothing but string. No beads. Just a dull feeling of nothingness where we try to be invisible even to ourselves. The patterns on our own grief necklace aren’t fixed. They may not be discernible. How and when each bead shows up may continually surprise us. And of course, your grief necklace and mine may not look at all similar. Whatever happens is your normal. Try not to need it to be anything other than it is. It’s a process. Your process.

A BIG HOLE:

When my father died I was devastated. He was the person I loved most after my son. He was also probably the person my son loved most after me. I told my son that we hurt big because we had loved big. Grandpa had loved us hugely. We had loved him the same way. I told my son the only way to protect against hurting as much as we did, from losing Grandpa, was to not love so big in the first place. If we had closed ourselves up and not let so much love in then we wouldn’t hurt as much, BUT we would never have gotten to feel all that love. We both believed that feeling the love was worth any potential pain. Not everyone agrees.

ROCK AND A NOT SO HARD PLACE:

Grief gets smaller over time. But. It never goes away. This is important to acknowledge. To accept. In the beginning grief crushes us. We’re under a boulder. Maybe only one of our fingers reaches out from underneath. We feel as if we can’t breathe. Or move. Eventually the boulder gets smaller. Though some days it grows back to its original size. This happens less frequently as time goes on. Especially if we are entertaining our feelings. Sitting with them. Drinking a warm beverage with them and hearing the stories they want to tell us. Eventually our grief becomes a pebble. One we can carry with us. Remember, grief doesn’t go away. We’ll take the pebble out from time to time and feel connected to the one we lost. We’ll remember them with love or some other emotion that works for us. Other days that tiny pebble will seem to weigh as much as the original boulder but it won’t last. It will just be a washing, a rewashing of emotions we need to continue to process over the rest of our lives. The pebble will begin to feel like part of us. Maybe one day we’ll be able to tuck it into a pocket in our soul and take it out and roll it through our fingers when we want to remember what we don’t want to forget.

Cinse Bonino
2023