The Shape of Grief
Recently, in my widow support group, we were asked if there was a “silver lining” to our grief. It’s a tricky question to answer because it feels strange admitting feeling positive about anything after the very negative thing of your loved one dying, and you feel you are failing in the grieving process if you aren’t healing/evolving quickly enough to see anything positive. Two years after Daryl’s death and nearly one year after the death of my mom, if there’s any silver lining it’s that grief has given me insight to better help friends and others who are going through very difficult times—divorce, terminal illness, death of friends and loved ones—because as a widow and a motherless daughter, I already live in the Grief Space.
Having death define your loved one is so, so hard. Just because they’re dead doesn’t mean the memories must all be colored with such a grim tone.
It’s true for those of us who are grieving, not every day is the worst day, just most days. It’s why I like to talk about how he lived, mention him in conversations, talk about what he did, funny memories, not just how he died. Cancer is the cruel vehicle that took him from the world, but it was only a small part of his life, two years. And that’s a hard one to navigate, too. Once cancer settles in it takes center stage in your life, it settles in like an infestation, eating up the scenery, dominating every waking minute and turning what your pre-cancer life and future goals into ash.
We tend to focus only on pain when we talk about grief.
The pain of grief is the loudest, squeakiest wheel, but what happens as it starts to quiet? What about the happiness you feel when you think of your person or, even with yourself for surviving? The ever-insightful Zen master, Thich Nhat Hanh, has many things to say about it:
If we can learn to see and skillfully engage with both the presence of happiness and the presence of suffering, we will go in the direction of enjoying life more. Every day we go a little farther in that direction, and eventually we realize that suffering and happiness are not two separate things.
In his book “Finding Meaning,” David Kessler says that the meaning isn’t in the suffering or the death, but what’s underneath. The meaning and the gratitude come from the fact that they lived a life, that life mattered and you had the privilege to know them. That works for me in that is implies the “underneath” is a fertile ground for something, for growth, even, none of it is separate, one thing feeds the other.
Face the grief or the grief shapes you.
I’ve read or heard this so many times. We all (kinds? sorta?) know that the pain we try to stuff down will just keep coming up in different ways. If I leave the grief and sadness alone, separate from other parts of my life, it will just ferment like a bottle of kombucha left out too long and explode all over friends, and loved ones. I try to tend to my grief every day in some way, sometimes it means remembering funny stories, doing something or going somewhere we both enjoyed—that can be hard, but it can also bring some joy—and inviting memories of Daryl or my mom into conversations.
It reminds me of the amazing Pixar film, Inside Out* where happy memories can be tainted if touched by sadness and yet, at the same time, the sadness is what can make a happy memory, too. Life is bittersweet, but sometimes it just feels bitter.
Daryl was a very bright and positive person, and to mourn him with only sorrow doesn’t feel right. I lost, the world lost, he lost, and yet, he was here, we were together, we existed, he engaged with the world and by doing so changed is in some way. When I think of losing him, I can’t just dwell on the emptiness, but must think of the spaces he filled, too. And it’s in those spaces that there is meaning that keeps me from walking into the abyss.
Right after Daryl died, a good friend said to me that, eventually, the grief gets “woven in” to the fabric of who you are. That resonated with me, because it combined me with Daryl, with my mom, with the grief, rather than keeping it separate. As I hold it and turn it around and around, I can feel that it is reshaping me in so many ways, it’s impossible for it not to, and I think that’s different from me taking on the shape of grief.
*Truth in Blogging: While writing I had to pause and cry for 10 minutes, because I had the memory of seeing Inside Out with Daryl in a small town in Connecticut that looked like Star’s Hollow at this cute little movie theater. He convinced me to see it, and we talked about it for a long time after, how good it was, how much it resonated. He was always great at showing me that what we might think of as “kids’ films” are usually so much more.
Additional listening/reading:
Podcast: Here After with Megan Devine: Grief, Collected with Amy Choi and Rebecca Lehrer