In our day to day lives, we often use common platitudes to muster up strength to get through challenging situations. Almost everyone I know does it at times…
- What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.
- God (or the universe) will never give you more than you can handle.
- You have to be grateful for <…..>
- Everything is temporary / This too shall pass.
- Everything happens for a reason.
- Time heals everything.
- Tomorrow is a new day.
- Happiness is a Choice.
- If you stay positive, good things will happen
- You’re a stronger person for having gone through all of this / you wouldn’t be who you are without the adversity that you faced
I could keep going… on occasion ideas like these can be helpful. When I’m having a rough week at work, I like to remind myself that it is not life or death, and that I’ll get through it. However, for many, many grieving people, ideas like those above do nothing but make things worse when it comes to our grief. Seriously. For me, they’re not helpful, not one teeny tiny bit. When I hear things like these aimed at me, it feels as if the person saying it is trying to minimize my grief, but my grief is not a problem. My grief is the natural response to experiencing loss, and I am not a lesser person for not pushing aside my grief to choose happiness.
Our culture is uncomfortable with deep, raw, real grief. Grief is seen as something that needs to be cured, or diminished, or gotten past. We are supposed to be happy and positive, and we’re supposed to push past all of our challenges to succeed and come out victorious no matter what obstacles get thrown in our way. To give in to grief, to allow a devastating event to stop us? Why that’s un-American!
People like feel-good stories about those who experience adversity and come away better off in the end with a nice tidy package about how their life is better now than it ever could have been before. There is a large subset of people who are simply uncomfortable around people whose lives do not fit “normal” (aka…happy, or at least, okay!). I honestly think part of it is that we all like to think that we have control over our lives, when in reality there is SO LITTLE that we actually control. When people experience tragedy or misfortune, we like to either find reasons why what happened to them couldn’t happen to us or we want to see the tragedy or misfortune turned into a happy ending to make us feel better.
At the end of the day, if you’re going to have a significant place in my life right now (and anytime in the near future), you’re going to need to find a way to be okay with my grief because it’s not going anywhere. I know for a fact the world would be a better place with Sara still here, and with George in our arms. I don’t believe everything happens for a reason – I think that part of being human is coping with shitty, awful, painful life events that have no reason. I did not need Sara’s death to give me a new perspective, or to make me appreciate everything I have in my life. I do not want to turn this awful experience of losing Sara and George into a reason to grow or to become a better person… frankly I like who I was (who I am) and the idea that any sort of personal growth on my part could magically make the pain I’ve been through worth it is insulting.
So if the type of sayings I listed above aren’t helpful, what do I want from people? Honestly, more often than not, just being around others who know that I’m grieving and who are okay with me not being the peppiest of people is all I really need. I just want conversation and company. Some grieving people struggle with all the mundane news of their friends’ lives, but I personally find it comforting. I don’t want or need anyone to try and fix me or heal me or make my grief less painful – that’s not something that anyone can do. You’re off the hook, so you can leave the platitudes at the door.
Reach out to schedule some time to get together with me. I’ve been trying to proactively schedule stuff with people because being with people has been incredibly important the last 4 months, but sometimes I worry about being an imposition and sometimes I just get tired of reaching out even though it helps. Let me talk about Sara or George or about what made me sad today. Talk about Sara if you knew her – speak Sara and George’s names and remind me that I’m not the only one grieving for them. Ask me how I’m doing in my grief.
While none of these things will really make me “better” they do help me live this new life I’ve suddenly found myself in.
I’ve tried 3 or 4 different ways to end this post now, and none of them are working. I’ll just add that this post is the response to a writing prompt I received a few days ago – it’s not directed at anyone specific! It is actually a more fleshed out version of a facebook post I made less than a week after Sara’s death, which was necessary because people WERE saying things like those in the list at the top of the post to me. I linked to this article about what not to say after a death, which I found helpful.
