Founded in 2014, National Grief Awareness Day, also known as National Bereavement Day, is marked each August 30. Its purpose is to raise awareness of how grief affects people in different ways, to encourage conversations about loss and bereavement, and to share information and resources. Related campaigns include Dying Matters Awareness Week in May and National Grief Awareness Week in December. We’ve marked several of these with such posts as Why Talking About Death Matters by celebrant Lisa Judson, a Q&A with Aimee Wilson, Project Lead of the pet bereavement project Gracie’s Way, and There’s No Wrong Way to Grieve: Thoughts on Loss and Mourning.
As I was researching a topic for this post I came across two quotations. The first is by Swiss-American psychiatrist and author Elisabeth Kubler-Ross.
The reality is that you will grieve forever. You will not “get over” the loss of a loved one; you will learn to live with it. You will heal and you will rebuild yourself around the loss you have suffered. You will be whole again, but you will never be the same. Nor should you be the same nor would you want to.
The second is by psychotherapist and author Megan Devine.
Grief is visceral, not reasonable: the howling at the center of grief is raw and real. It is love in its most wild form.
These are highly credentialed professionals. Elisabeth Kubler-Ross died in 2004 having established the Five Stages of Loss model that bears her name. Megan Devine is the author of It’s OK That You’re NOT OK: Meeting Grief and Loss in a Culture That Doesn’t Understand and How to Carry What Can’t Be Fixed: A Journal for Grief. I claim no privileged knowledge, skills, or insight but these quotations caught me off guard. Neither reflects my lived experience in any way.
I’m sixty-five years old. Over the years I’ve lost both parents, numerous aunts and uncles, and too many friends. Some losses hit me harder than others but none devastated me, even temporarily. I didn’t suffer, dramatically or otherwise. There was no howling at the centre of my grief. Their deaths weren’t something I had to recover from. Nothing needed to be healed or rebuilt.
My purpose in writing this blog post is to affirm that my experience of grief — gentle, quiet, and unremarkable — is as valid as any other. I’ve touched on this previously. The following is excerpted from There’s No Wrong Way to Grieve written for last year’s National Grief Awareness Week.
There’s no record of how I felt when my father died, but I didn’t cry until years later when a friend asked how he’d died. I wrote the following in March 2019 for a blog post that was to be titled “Death Is Different: Contemplating Bereavement and Loss on the Anniversary of My Mother’s Death.”
Last week saw the first anniversary of my mother’s death. You might imagine I would be feeling something. Loss. Pain. Guilt, perhaps. Relief, even. But there’s little I can name. Maybe you’re thinking, well he must be mourning and just not realising it. That feels a bit presumptuous to me, and in any case I’m not sure it’s right.
I’m not alone in this. Not everyone experiences loss as acute distress or a life changing event. My friend Aimee founded the pet bereavement project Gracie’s Way. She has received messages from people wanting to share their sincere yet muted response to the loss of their beloved animal companions. One said that while they hated the thought of anyone else feeling the way they did, they hoped there might be others who understood because they felt very alone in their grief. Just because someone isn’t crying their eyes out doesn’t mean they’re not in need of support. No matter the nature of the loss, gentle grieving deserves respect and recognition too.
And yet such responses to the death of a loved one are scarcely acknowledged. I admire Megan Devine’s book It’s OK That You’re Not OK and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it to someone deeply affected by loss. There is little in there, however, for someone like me who grieves gently. You might ask what need I have for support and understanding if my life is so little inconvenienced by the death of those closest to me. The question uncovers a paradox in our response to death and dying. We’re expected to grieve just enough and just long enough. Too much or too long are met with disapproval, yet grieving too little is also considered problematic. This can leave people unsure of their emotional responses and doubting the nature of their relationship with those they’ve lost. In her book, Devine highlights this societal pressure to move promptly and conveniently through our grief.
Our culture sees grief as a kind of malady: a terrifying, messy emotion that needs to be cleaned up and put behind us as soon as possible. As a result, we have outdated beliefs around how long grief should last and what it should look like. We see it as something to overcome, something to fix, rather than something to tend or support.
I agree but in highlighting the problem — and seeking to address it — she overlooks those who do not experience grief in this way. “Pain is a healthy, normal response when someone you love is torn from your life,” she asserts. “It hurts, but that doesn’t make pain wrong.” Not everyone experiences loss as pain, and that isn’t wrong either. Those of us who grieve gently deserve to be acknowledged, not least because we make it easier on those around us.
The one time Devine mentions a gentle response to death is in the case of her stepson who was eighteen years old when his father died. “His tendency to be more private, plus his natural teenager-ness, meant he didn’t say very much about his dad. He said even less about himself.” It may be that her stepson was suppressing his emotions or struggled to express them. I cannot know but the author seems incapable of accepting that death can be simply lived through by those left behind. “Someone asked me the other day if I thought my stepson had ‘processed’ his dad’s death,” she writes, “or if it continues to affect him. How can it not continue to affect him? His dad is still dead.” I was the same age as her stepson when my father died, albeit under less tragic circumstances. I do not continue to be affected by his death and resent the implication that I should be.
To express less grief than society expects is to invite disapproval at best. The lead character in Albert Camus’ novel The Stranger is condemned to death as much for his lack of emotion at the death of his mother as for his crime. The author of Grief, Judgment, and the Absurd: Why Camus’ The Stranger Still Matters expresses this well.
Meursault experiences his emotions naturally, yet society demands that he display grief in a “proper” way. He does not comply, and strikingly, during his trial, the court focuses more on whether he cried at the funeral than on the murder he committed. This made me realize how often society values appearances over authentic human emotions.
The pathologising of grief is made explicit when we note that there are three broad categories: normal, absent, and complicated. Despite assurances that “there is no wrong way to grieve and even normal grief can become complicated if the individual is ill-equipped to handle it” it’s clear from this account that two of these categories are considered abnormal or problematic.
Normal grief, we learn, “is the name given to a typical grieving process. While unpleasant, traumatic and painful, there is nothing abnormal about this type of journey through grief. And while it might be different for everyone, the general pathway and emotions are similar.” Complicated grief “is a more severe form of bereavement. It is when the grieving process does not follow the typical path, or when the individual experiences excessive and intense grief that gets in the way of their life. This type of grief often leads to mental health problems such as depression and anxiety.”
By elimination, my grief would fall into the third category. “Absent grief occurs when the person has already grieved the loss extensively before the person has passed away. This can lead to complicated and complex feelings of guilt, anger and denial. When the grief is absent, it can leave individuals feeling that there is something wrong with them.” I reject the description and explanations. I have no complicated or complex feelings of guilt, anger, or denial. Any sense of feeling something is wrong with me comes from the lack of acknowledgement and understanding that this kind of gentle grief is natural to some and no more a problem to be addressed than any other kind.
According to Absent Grief: Why Am I Not Grieving Like I Expected To? the APA Dictionary of Psychology defines absent grief as “[a] form of complicated grief in which a person shows no, or only a few, signs of distress about the death of a loved one. This pattern of grief is thought to be an impaired response resulting from denial or avoidance of the emotional realities of the loss.” I find this sad and disturbing. I do not consider my response to the loss of my parents, family members, and friends to have been in any way “impaired.” The article acknowledges that “only some [of the reasons someone might feel they aren’t grieving as much as they expected] are related to things like avoidance, denial, and complicated grief.” It nevertheless proceeds to offer a series of explanations for such abberant behaviour. These include the person having an idea of grief based on assumptions rather than reality, anticipatory grief, the loss not having sunk in yet, avoidance, or not having had a close relationship with the person who died. Any of these may play a part, but I reject the idea that my response to death needs to be justified or explained to anyone, myself included.
Grief is arguably the most personal and intimate of our experiences. We don’t owe anyone a performance. It’s not a test to be passed or failed. Death’s significance isn’t measured in how many tears we shed, how long it takes us to pick up the pieces of our lives, or how many sleepless nights we endure. The way we grieve — or don’t — isn’t a measure of our love for the person we lost. It is what it is. It is enough. We are enough.
Over to You
In this post I’ve shared something of how I’ve experienced the loss of people dear to me, and how poorly that fits into the generally accepted model of grieving. I’m interested to know how this resonates for you. Do you grieve gently, with little or no outward expression of what you’re feeling? Has loss affected you deeply and devastatingly? What has helped you at such times? If you’ve supported someone through their grief, were you able to empathise with their way of grieving or did it seem odd or different to you? I’d love to hear your thoughts and experiences, either in the comments below or via our contact page.
Photo by Nada Ghanna0 at Unsplash.
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