I entered grief therapy in 2009. The year before, I lost three people close to me: two mentors, and one of my closest friends. My grief issues go back long before that with the death of my father in 1997. In the years I’ve been in therapy, I’ve learned a few things about grief and what it not only does to you, the perception of people around you have of you.
The first family member to die, that I have a recollection of anyway, is my dad’s dad when I was seven. My mom’s dad, and my dad’s mom both passed when I was too young to note the event. My dad was sad, and I asked how grandpa had died. Dad told me he had just been sitting in a chair, reading the paper when it happened. I asked if he’d been reading the comics? Dad, puzzled, answered that he didn’t know, and why did I ask? I said, maybe grandpa had laughed himself to death, and wasn’t that a good way to go? My mom, horrified, opened her mouth to admonish me, but instead, my dad started laughing. He laughed so hard I thought maybe he would die, too. My dad didn’t laugh like that often, and it almost scared us. (side note: As a stand-up comedian, I never got a laugh as big as the one from my dad that day).
Grief lies to us in many different ways.
Probably the most seditious is when it tells us we could’ve done something different to change the course of events impacting our lives. It tells us, “We should’ve remembered to say ‘I love you’ one more time before the person we love rung off the phone.” It tells us, “We should’ve had one less drink before telling the boss to go fuck themselves.” It tells us, “We should’ve left a party earlier or gotten more sleep or not slammed a door or not had that argument over something petty or prayed more or went to church more or stopped going to church so much, whatever.” You’ll tell yourself, “It’s all my fault,” then come up with a rationale to prove it. There are a million lies to put the blame on you, instead of allowing you to grieve the loss of something or someone important in your life. This can cause the pain to last longer, and never actually provide you healing.
And loss is not limited to just the death of a loved one. That’s another lie. Losing a job. Losing an award. Losing a friend who decided to walk out of your life and never come back. A romantic break-up. The end of a TV series you loved. Breaking your favorite cereal bowl that your long-dead favorite Uncle gave you. It’s a lie to think these things can’t trigger grief, but they can and will. And so the next lie is to tell you that you’re not allowed grieve these things because grief is only allowed for death. But you will even in these circumstances, and you will blame yourself for doing it.
Here’s where the lie ends though. If you could’ve done anything to avoid the situation, you would have. You know you would have. How could you have possibly known it would be the last time you spoke with your loved one? None of us can see the future. None of us can see every outcome of every action we do. Oh, sure, we can make predications based on experience and evidence. We know dating a certain type of person will only leave us heartbroken in the end. All of us have heard stories from someone who had an argument with a loved one and then that someone died before they could apologize. We’ve all had friends struggling with depression and ultimately thought they were going to be okay. We already knew that risky joke wasn’t going to land. All of us know what happens when we leave the door, gate, window open/unlocked if we have pets, children, or senile parents.
We are not stupid, and yet, we will make those mistakes despite our best efforts. We try daily to predict those make those mistakes and avoid them. We will succeed a thousand times, but all that will stick in our minds is the one time we didn’t. That if we’d just done it the thousand and oneth time, we wouldn’t be dealing with the grief we are feeling now.
Gabor Maté says, in his book, The Myth of Normal: Trauma, Illness, and Healing in a Toxic Culture, that “Whether we realize it or not, it is our woundedness, or how we cope with it, that dictates much of our behavior, shapes our social habits, and informs our ways of thinking about the world.”
Grief has been a constant companion of mine since my father died of a heart attack while picking me up from a date three days after Christmas in 1987. I was home visiting from college, got a chance to go out with this amazing girl, but had no car. He drove me to and picked me up from…in a snowstorm…because he loved me. On the way home, we stopped to help some stranded teens get their car unstuck from a snowbank. He collapsed right after, and I wasted moments calling for help instead of immediately performing CPR. Did those moments cost him his life? According to the EMTs, no. He was gone as soon as he hit the ground. Did that stop me from blaming myself for years? Again, no. That was the first time I’d heard a death rattle, but it wouldn’t be the last. It never leaves you. Its memories like that grief will use to tell you it was “all your fault” long after the event’ long after the grief should’ve been processed, (but not gotten over. Never let anyone ever tell you to “get over” your grief. That, too, is a lie).
I’m an atypical thinker, clearly on the spectrum somewhere. My bio-dad and son both are, and unlike magic powers, I don’t think it skips a generation. I don’t always understand the rules of conduct. Despite “knowing” these rules, and how to behave in any situation, my mouth often works faster than my brain, and I do more damage in one conversation than all the times I got it right before. I have medical conditions that leave me exhausted after just a few hours of social activity and often in a half-awake state. I’ve been playing, like many of us do, Russian roulette with anti-depressants and anti-ADHD meds in hopes that something might help me silence the voices that tell me I’ll never got over my grief, that I’ll never feel well again, that I’ll never get it right. Some days it’s hard for me to write, to edit, to think, to believe in myself, and then, when grief hits, it hits even harder than it would under the best of circumstances.
I know this about me. I’m learning to accept it through therapy, along with accepting the grief without taking “blame” for it. It’s not easy, and cycles repeat. I’ve punished myself emotionally for not being normal enough, professional enough, romantic enough, a better friend, a better pet owner, a better son, husband, father, brother, boss, and so forth. I can’t fix everything I do wrong, even when I try my best to do so. But losing an opportunity to make a good first impression and leaving a bad last impression are indeed things to be grieved, as well.
When I lost those three friends tragically in 2008, I was so numb I couldn’t feel love from my son or anyone else. I had to do some hard work to break out of that period, thanks in part to some other good friends who stuck by me. Since then, I’ve lost a daughter, two parents, four more mentors, several friends, and many more peers. That’s the risk you take when you leave your house and meet people. Anyone one of them can become important to you. And it’s possible you’ll lose them before you can recover from the last one. One of the worst pains is when someone chooses to walk out of your life, whether it be romantically, or a friendship, or as a peer. Maybe they tell will tell you it’s all your fault (and sometimes it is). I get so depressed when this happens, driving myself crazy playing “What if?”s and “How could I’ve been better?” These types of loses can trigger grief until you give up and wonder why you should keep on trying to make friends, or care about other people, or go on living?
But these people are lying to you, just like grief, because if they really knew the person you were, they’d know that you would’ve never made a decision that hurt them, said those words that embarrassed them (and you), or done something else/something better, if you could’ve predicted the repercussions. If they really knew you, loved you, then they’d know how much your heart breaks every time this happens, and that you’d try so much harder the next time to do better, be better, and can’t they see all the times you have?
Like your grief, in these moments, they’ve forgotten all the times you did say, “I love you,” before a loved one got in that car, or how many times you lifted the associates around you and cheered on their successes, or all the times you thought you left the door open only to run home to find it closed, and your pet wondering why you’re back, and does this mean you’ll feed them again? People who activate your grief reflex don’t want you to remember all that good stuff. They only want you to pay for your mistakes, which I guarantee are fewer than your victories; victories, mind you, that often go unnoticed because you’re just behaving normally like you’re supposed to.
I’ve been watching Ted Lasso right now, because I’ve heard how uplifting it is. Ted speaks about this need in people to judge you in this quote that stuck with me:
“Guys have underestimated me my entire life and for years I never understood why – it used to really bother me. Then one day I was driving my little boy to school, and I saw a quote by Walt Whitman, it was painted on the wall there and it said, ‘Be curious, not judgmental.’ I like that. So, I get back in my car and I’m driving to work and all of a sudden it hits me – all them fellas that used to belittle me, not a single one of them was curious. You know, they thought they had everything all figured out, so they judged everything, and they judged everyone. And I realized that they’re underestimating me – who I was had nothing to do with it.”
Another quote, from author Bessel van der Kolk, echoes this,
“Trauma is when we are not seen and known.”
To be clear, though, not blaming yourself for having grief does not excuse accountability for your actions, when those actions have hurt other people. Blame wants you to feel horrible about yourself; that you are worthless and will never do better. Accountability, conversely, is freeing. It acknowledges your mistakes and creates paths to forgiveness while also showing that you’re mature enough to own your mistakes. Accountability isn’t instinctual. We have built in fight or flight responses. Grief can activate those, and we will do anything but look at ourselves in these situations. But, upon finding that you are the cause of your grief, accountability rescues you from blame. As a writer and editor, I know words have power. “Yes, I was being a dick. I’m so sorry.” “Yes, I’m the one who left the gate open. It’s my fault Charles Barkey got out.” “Yes, I should’ve left earlier when I realized I was so tired. If I had, I wouldn’t have put myself in that situation.”
Accountability makes plans to avoid the same situation again, allows others to offer advice, and opens you up to hear it. Blame will not do that. Instead, we want to blame because blame is easier, and, if we can blame others for our grief, we can have someone else to carry the weight of it. “Well, they shouldn’t have driven in icy conditions,” or “My co-worker should’ve been nicer to me then I wouldn’t have needed to rage quit,” and so on. Blaming others also keeps accountability from happening. There is no balance between blame and accountability. They are polar opposites, and the journey from one to the other can be exhausting, especially when you have other conditions affecting you. Training yourself to go directly to accountability reduces the energy output blame takes from you. It keeps your head clearer for processing grief. It helps you make better choices while grieving.
The people that love me know that I care about everyone I meet—a gift given to me by my parents. Growing up, “strangers were friends, friends were family,” and “how could you ever show someone’s God’s love if you’re judging them and telling them everything about them is wrong?” That’s one of the things I love about editing someone’s work. When I tell someone their story can be improved, it’s only about the story, and not about them. I adore them, or I wouldn’t be editing their work. (Secret revealed. This is why I don’t do open slush).
When I cannot connect with someone professionally, it pains me. When romantic relationships don’t work out, it frustrates me. When friendships end, I grieve. But I’m coming to realize, sometimes, though not every time, there was nothing I could’ve done differently to change it. No words I could’ve said to stop it. No words I could now say to fix it. Because, if there had been, I would’ve said them and, maybe, that just wasn’t possible for me in that moment. It was the one wrong step out of million right ones, and I have to stop letting my grief blame me for it. All I can do is what I’ve been doing since day one:
Try to be a better you today than you were yesterday,
and if you can’t…well, you still have tomorrow to try again.
It’s not easy to stop listening to your grief. It’s not easy to let go of the “what could’ve been”s. It’s not easy to stop the blame game, but just as you wouldn’t listen to a person you knew was lying to you, why should you continue to listen those same lies when the person lying to you…is you?
Faithfully written,
DB
01/09/24
[Author’s note] – This essay was written before my bio-dad, Rob, passed away on 1/29/24. It doesn’t reflect the complicated feelings I’m experiencing sitting in a hotel room, preparing to do another round of clean-out on his hoarder’s apartment tomorrow. When I wrote this, I was dealing with several losses, not specifically connected to the death of a loved one. I thought about updating this essay to reflect those thoughts, but honestly, he’ll need an essay all of his own, so I’ll write that one at some time in the future and let you know.
DB
02/13/24