092 - Finding your own grief pace
and other conversations from my week.
Welcome back (or welcome)
This is last issue of “Finding Words in Hard Times” for 2024.
In the week between Christmas and New Year’s, if you have any spare time, any need to browse, you can go back to the archives. (And since I’m working Christmas Day, I’d rather not be writing.)
I thought about writing a year-end review of best posts and resources or inviting you to write about what you’ve learned in 2024 about being helpful in loss. But that would involve too much archival work for me, and, perhaps, difficult memories for you.
(Though we’ll all listen if you want to talk about learnings)
And I don’t have to go to the archives. These are conversations from this week.
That is a person who has died.
The other day, I was watching yet another new story that obscured the death of a person while focusing on the person responsible for the death.
I thought, “But the person died. And there are people who miss him.”
That’s you, too. In all the swirl of life and explanations, your person died and you still miss them. Or the people you care about. Their person died and they still miss them.
In all the noise and news, in all the anxiousness about or for what’s going to happen, if you still want a moment, or a day, to stop and miss your person, please do. If you need to talk with a professional, please do. If you need to talk with others, please do.
The media moves to the next outrage, the next scandal, the next.
But we don’t have to follow. We can linger and care as the camera moves on.
Being the friends that listen.
I was talking to a friend the other day about some of the research I’m pursuing. She said, “We don’t talk about grief enough.” And another friend, walking through the first months after his dad’s sudden death said, “We need to talk about grief more.”
And I think, “We talk about it all the time.”
And then I think, “Just look at all the grief memoirs.”
And then I stopped.
The reason for grief memoirs is that we don’t talk about grief enough.
In a memoir, a person talks about a season in their life and how it was shaped by some event or change. In grief memoirs, as I want to use the term, people talk about a death and their response. And one of the themes of grief memoirs, whether essay length or book length, is giving voice to the feelings that no one wants to talk about.
Perhaps a reason that so many people are writing about their loss these days is because not enough of us are available for the conversations.
On not living up to grieving expectations.
I talked with a friend whose dad died this year. She’s a little concerned that she’s not meeting people’s expectations.
Christmas has been disrupted for the last several years. Dementia is, after all, disruptive to everyone involved. So mixed in with the sadness is a freedom to decorate, to celebrate, to congregate.
People aren’t understanding that relief. Particularly people who may have lost a different person, at a different age, in a different way.
Somehow, we feel a need to tell others how they ought to feel, sometimes based on how we were told how to feel.
We can stop that.
I told my friend that I was glad. And I am. Though I, too, miss who he was.
(In “035 - Shield the joyous” I talk about space for laughing.)
All these things are thinking about grief literacy
I watched a video this week about a project asking young adults, 14-24, about grief. Their insights about what they need are helpful, even though they live on the other side of the world from me (in Australia).
Grief literacy for young people
Grief literacy, (or as the kids say, being grief smart) I would suggest, is having words, concepts, skills, processes, and resources as a person, family, and community in order to be helpful to people in time of loss, particularly death. And I’ll be writing more about this, in clearer ways, next year.
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But for this year, this is it. Thanks for reading and sharing. Thanks for your patience when I don’t respond. Thanks for taking ideas and using them. Thanks for your support.
From Nancy and I, have some merry in your Christmas.
See you next year.
Jon
Hey Jon - one part of grieving is often not knowing exactly how I sound, or how my point comes across to others. You lose your bearings while grieving.
That said, I want you to know that you are an expert who actually gets it. This was not directed at you (I suspect you knew that but I need to say it to feel better 😉).
In the process of grief, it seems to me as if nothing beats the good ol’ fashioned ‘ministry of presence’. Just being there in some way, even in complete silence, brings comfort like nothing else.
So I say all this to let you know that while you are an ‘expert’, that just scratches the surface. You are a doer and a practitioner. That is why your work is so valuable. Keep it up.
Jon - Telling someone how to grieve has become more problematic, and likely more common, since everyone tells everyone else how to do everything. There is nothing that pushes me to the point of sheer anger (and not in a righteous, productive way at all), than someone who tells someone how to grieve.
I am still trying to figure out my own grieving of the loss of my mom this year. I can’t even read about an expert on the subject without feeling that I am doing something wrong.
There is a no more disheartening feeling than that of feeling like you are doing your lost loved one a disservice through your inability to grieve ‘correctly’.