by MIA FREEDMAN
Six weeks. That’s about the length of time after a tragedy when the shock subsides, the adrenaline wears off and reality sinks in.
Unfortunately, it’s also around the six week mark when – if the tragedy didn’t affect you directly – you kind of forget about it. You dropped over a lasagna. You sent flowers. You texted and maybe you even took time off work to attend the funeral. You shed tears and they were genuine.
But then your sympathy and altruism were swallowed by the demands of day to day life like quick sand. And things soon returned to normal. Well, for you they did.
Those at the centre of the tragedy are still tentatively patting themselves down after the explosion having staggered one or two steps down a road that stretches into forever. This is when they need the most support, right when most of their friends have filed the situation away under “Really Sad Things That Are In The Past”.
Partly, it’s because we want to believe they’re feeling better but we also feel helpless and uncomfortable, unsure how to help someone navigate their grief.
“After the “I’m so sorry’s” and “Here’s a lasagna” … people just don’t know what to say” says a friend who was bereaved last year. “So they say nothing. Or worse, they just move on and probably think ‘Well, she’ll just have to get used to her new reality’ … which is true to a point.”
In the days after a death, there’s a surprising amount to do. Funerals to be planned, eulogies to be written, people to notify. Administration. In the case of a shock diagnosis, there are decisions and medical appointments to be made. But as days become weeks, the activity subsides and the even harder yards begin.
“People tend to drift away at around the time you’re trying to work out how to function again in the world” says a friend who lost her baby daughter two years ago. “The initial deep shock has started to wear off and there you are … just floating along with no idea how to behave any more. You start to panic about boring people. About being depressing. A downer. God forbid. People desperately want to think you’re okay … maybe so you’re no longer on their ‘to do’ list to worry about. “
Grief is often a private affair that others cannot share or perhaps even understand, agrees Petrea King, author of Sometimes Hearts Have to Break and CEO of the Quest for Life Foundation. “Grief can spring out of drawers and cupboards, off shelves, from photographs, wafts to our nostrils upon a perfume, is precipitated by music, clutches at our heart, hollows out our insides and plummets us to the depths.”
We’re funny about grief. We like to think it’s finite and able to be quantified and quarantined. We like to talk about ‘closure’. We think we’re being helpful when we urge someone to ‘be strong’ or exclaim ‘you look so well!’ to a friend who’s sick or bereaved in the hope that it might just be true.
“About two months after we lost our daughter, I remember an elderly neighbour saying,‘Oh you look like you’re back to your old self,’” recalls my friend Rebecca. ” I looked at him in horror and then went inside and wept. How could I be communicating to people I was ‘okay’? I wasn’t okay! My baby died! So you’re always trying to find this balance between wanting the world to know you’re in deep mourning but not inconveniencing anyone.”
“Sometimes I worry I’m bringing it up too often,” admits another bereaved friend who is sinking after he unexpectedly lost a loved one earlier this year. “But it’s all I can think about and in some ways it’s worse now because I’m no longer buoyed by the wonderful flurry of support that held us up in the weeks after it happened.”
Rebecca told me of wanting to post something about her older daughter on Facebook six weeks after her baby girl was stillborn. “I was paralysed because I kept thinking “But what if people think that because I’m on Facebook, that I’m fine now?”
So what can we do to support our friends in the darkness? Talking to a number of bereaved people, they all say they feel they’ve been given a gift when someone speaks the name of the person they’ve lost. When they give them a chance to talk, cry, even laugh.
“It’s the small things that people do,” says the mother whose son died the day after he was born and who gave mourners at his funeral little bags of sunflower seeds to plant in his memory. “Like sharing photos of their sunflowers or letting us know that they keep photos of our son close by, even talking about their ‘nephew’ or ‘grandson’, saying his name….they’re all reminders that they care.”
Petrea King puts it so beautifully: “Grief is a strange beast that we learn to live with. We don’t get ‘over it’ as if it were a surmountable obstacle. We can become more comfortable with our discomfort but there is no finite time for grief as there is no finite time for love. “
How have you handled grief in your life?
Top Comments
My son passed away 9years ago. The pain is as raw today as it was the night that I held him in my arms as he took his last breath. I listened to all the cliches from close friends, family and strangers about how it would ease, time heals all wounds etc,etc. None of it is true. Time does not heal and the pain does not become easier. You function like a normal human being, you give the right responses when required, you raise your remaining with all the love in the world, but fundamentally you're broken. I always likened the pain to somebody ripping you open with a knife,walking around with your guts hanging out and it's invisible to the rest of the world. And God forbid you mention your loss because you immediately see the looks on their faces, they can't run away fast enough or steer the conversation in another direction quickly enough. A year after it happened I was meant to be acting like my old self, except that is when I started falling apart and it was during that time that I needed support more than ever before. Life had gone on for my friends, some had ceased all contact because they had done their bit during the funeral and the weeks that followed and that is where it ended. I had a mental breakdown 2 years after my son passed away and it has taken me at least6-7years to recuperate. I don't have the close friendships that I used to have because I've realised that you walk this path alone, only others who have lost children will truly understand.
Bereavement is SUCH a difficult thing and grieving process. There is no end. Some deaths affect us more than others, but mostly, the ones of real loss, we grieve forever. We never forget, the pain doesn't disappear, it just lessens and becomes easier to deal with.
But death isn't the only time we grieve and the basic message from this post can be put into various circumstances. We grieve in divorce, when we break up with our boyfriends, when we lose a friendship, when something passes away, we miscarriage... It's all a feeling of loss and we grieve that loss. In ALL these circumstances, similar things happen. Friends don't understand, they assume you are ok and if you make it known you are not, then they ASSUME you should be. Often they get "sick of hearing about it" or "just can't cope with your sadness anymore"... but the thing is, it's not their place to judge how long or how hard you take any situation. It's no ones place to tell you how often, how much information, or how many times you cry... No one understands anyone's grief, even if they have been through the same situation. It's important for people to ALWAYS remember, anyone dealing with a difficult situation and a loss, they need to be prepared to support their friends and family, no matter how long it takes.
I recently went through something similar, but have various times before. When my abusive boyfriend left me, when I lost a family member, and when I recently broke up with someone i love with all my heart - each time certain friends have reacted in the same way - "You need to get over it and move on." Easy for you to say. This is a great article and hopefully people can take its message.
Thanks for sharing.