Grief: Doing it Wrong?

[jimhines]

For me, blogging has always been a way of sharing things I care about and connecting with folks. That encompasses everything from sexual assault issues to arguments in the SF/F community to just geeking out about whatever catches my interest in a given week.

Well, the focus of my life has been a bit different for the past ten months, and especially so since August 29. An awful lot of my time and energy is spent dealing with the aftermath of losing Amy. There’s paperwork — so much paperwork — and belongings to sort through and online accounts to clean up and close, not to mention the whole single parent thing.

And I’ve been immersing myself in that work, partly because it needs to be done, but partly because it keeps the grief from dragging me down… sometimes.

Maybe it’s my own background in psychology. Maybe it’s having spent almost 16 years married to someone with so much more experience in psychology and counseling. But I keep worrying that I’m grieving wrong.

I’ve attended three sessions at Ele’s Place, where I’m dealing with the most recent death in our group. Sometimes it’s helpful to be in a room with people who understand. Other times, someone will talk about a particular feeling — take guilt, for example — and I end up wondering why I don’t feel that too. What’s wrong with me?

I know everyone grieves differently. I know it’s ridiculous to expect my grief to follow the same paths and patterns as anyone else’s.

I also know grief is hard. I lost my wife and best friend. I lost my partner. I lost the future we expected to have together, all the hopes and dreams and plans… It’s overwhelming, and it’s tempting to lock it all away in a box and not deal with it.

I know that’s not the healthiest approach. It’s one of the reasons I wanted to start attending Ele’s Place, to force myself to face that grief, to work on figuring out how to live with it.

I keep questioning. Why haven’t I cried more? Am I just a cold, stone-hearted person? Is it because I cried so often during the nine months we were fighting cancer, and I’m just exhausted and cried-out?

I realized earlier this year that a part of me was grieving even before we knew whether Amy would survive. (And I felt guilty as hell about that, too.) In trying to understand what the hell was wrong with me, I discovered something called anticipatory grief.

Apparently what I was going through was kind of normal? But it means some of the wounds don’t feel quite so exposed. It’s been just over a month since I was able to talk to her, but it’s been almost a year since we were able to sleep together in our own bed. If grief is a path, I feel like my progress along that path skips around from one day to the next. It’s disorienting and confusing.

The biggest symptom I’m aware of is lack of sleep. I still have a really hard time getting to sleep at night. All the thoughts I’ve been too busy to deal with during the day come rushing back. I roll over and touch her pillow and remember snuggling up with her. I talk to her. I try to sleep, and after a half hour or an hour I give up and read for a bit or find something else to do. And then it’s 6:10, and the alarm is telling me it’s time to get up and get my son ready for school…

Part of me feels relieved that I’m not sleeping. It’s a reminder that I’m not stone-hearted, that I’m hurting and grieving just like I’m supposed to. But I also know it’s not healthy, and I’m trying to adjust things to help me sleep a little better.

I don’t know what I’m doing. There’s no handbook. One therapist says it’s good I’m keeping busy. Another points out that keeping busy is a way to avoid facing those hard feelings. I suspect they’re both right. Everyone grieves differently, and it’s a process that lasts years, if not an entire lifetime.

And I’m basically winging it. Trying to figure it out day by day, the best I can.

From what I’ve learned, that’s pretty much how grief works.

Comments

[swan_tower]

I'm not sure there's any such thing as "grieving wrong." There are certainly behaviors that can become unhealthy, and keeping an eye out for that is good . . . but there's no checklist. There's only the question of whether you're making things worse for yourself or those around you (e.g. if somebody starts abusing alcohol in the wake of a loss). If you aren't in that camp, then you're doing it right.

As for anticipatory grief -- hell, I sometimes get blindsided with flashes of that on a normal day. I know that eventually I will lose my parents, and if I let myself dwell on that fact, it could drag me down to no good purpose. It's different when someone is known to be ill, though. It makes perfect sense that your mind would start shifting around that fact, mourning the small losses before the big one, coming to at least partial terms with what happens later.

Hang in there. I hope you can sleep better soon.

[mirlacca]

What swan_tower said.

Every word.

Please don't wind up trying to do someone else's grief. You're doing exactly what is right for you, and the uncertainty is a solid part of it. I wish there was a way to make it easier, but there isn't. Your path is your path, and I am so sorry you have to walk it.

[ilyena_sylph]

I don't know you well, but I empathize so much with the feeling of 'am I doing this wrong'?

I was basically incapable of crying when my father died. I wanted to, so badly, but it just... wouldn't come. For weeks. It did eventually, but that was awful.

When my great-grandmother died, I couldn't stop crying. And that was awful too.

There's no right grieving. There's just grief.

[snippy]

It's possible you're still in shock. Perhaps others have told you that the first occasions of note since your loss will bring it up strongly: the first holiday, the first new year, the first spring, the first birthday...all the things you unthinkingly counted on spending with your loved one.

I have never found grief to be a path. It's more like unpredictable waves, like when a boat goes by on the river. Suddenly my calm is disturbed by grief, and it may take a few waves to settle into the new state of calm.

[lassarina]

I think not only is there no one way for any individual to grieve, there's no one way to grieve people. I grieved for my godmother differently than my paternal grandmother, and when I lose my maternal grandmother (please gods may that day yet be years away) it'll be different yet.

I don't have a background in psychology, but it makes sense to me that your brain knows you've got a lot to do - you've got your kids relying on you, there's your own life to handle, and the things you have to manage around her death - and it's doing its best to get you through that. Except the thing with brains is they do things in weird ways that don't look like what we want, or understand.

As others have said - you'll grieve your way.

My thoughts are with you and yours.

[ndrosen]

I hope there’s no such thing as grieving wrong, or I have a lot to answer for. I didn’t weep when my mother died, a bit more than four years ago. I miss her, but her death happened, and it was probably for the best that she died of something else before her developing Alzheimer’s could steal her mind.

Am I a cold fish? It could well be, but if I had hurt more over her death, if I had cried and cried, what good would it have done anyone? Would God, if there be a God, be pleased with me? I repeatedly visited her (and my father while he lived) in their assisted living facility. When her life was over, it was over, or if people outlive their bodies, that part is outside my power.

So please pardon my intrusion, and don’t blame yourself for doing grief wrong; you feel as you feel, and react as you react. Try to control what you can, and be a good father to your son, and a good friend and neighbor. I do not think that your beloved wife would blame you for not weeping more.

[ckd]

Your grief, and your expression of your grief, is yours. It may resemble that of others, sometimes, in some ways; it may be its own unique thing. It is beyond right or wrong, for it simply IS.

May you gain comfort in knowing that you are not alone, for many of us care about you and are holding you in our hearts and thoughts. We may not know the shape of your grief, but we know that it is there.

[martianmooncrab]

do what you can do, some people we miss every day of our lives, and others.. well.. not so much. Its like a sore that scabs over, its still there, but... slowly healing..

[shesingsnow]

I can say that anticipatory grief is something very real. In my world, my person was dying for so long that by the time she had actually left this world, there was still grief left to carry, but I had processed her death in many ways before she died. It's very different from when someone is lost in an instant, unexpected way.

I am so very sorry for your loss.

[reedrover]

As above.

My father died of cancer, and we knew it was coming for a long time. We did a lot of pre-grieving together and separately as the many small deaths of hopes and dreams came about. Every "now we'll never..." moment was its own sorrow to work through. We still had about a year of blundering around to find the new normal, but it didn't feel or look the same as anyone else's grief. We had a few conversations about how we didn't seem to be suffering in quite the same way or as... traumatically? ... as other people.

Thankfully, even people who don't understand our grief can be kind. There is no "wrong" besides flat-out denial/avoidance. Be kind to yourself and take the path you feel is right.

[jhetley]

For what it's worth, I don't think it is possible to do grief wrong. Circumstances and people vary too much for that.

[adhirman]

There is no One True Way. And lo... there is no one true way to grieve. For me, having been around for the massive die out of gay men, friends and lovers and strangers, my relationship with grief and death is a bit weird. For one thing I recognize there are kind of milestones of things we all hit, places in the journey. But the paths, the journey's length and ferocity and texture is never the same.

I always felt I grieved too much. Too openly, too much, too long.

I don't really sleep as much as I used to anymore. There's a part of me that sometimes on weekends when I'm up at 5 in the morning, still not having gone to bed until I absolutely pass out, that thinks : if you stay awake you miss less of life. Sleep feels like such a waste, a.. a kind of squandering of time. Of this life I'm in the middle of.

It doesn't help that I spent hours at a time staring at the ceiling and thinking. W is 54, poz since 92. His health isn't what it was, he had a heart attack 2 years ago. He's a laundry list of "yeah, but"s waiting to happen. Anticipatory? Yep. Check.

I hate sleep. I hate that I can't find a way to be awake and gentle and not like there are ants somewhere deep inside skittering around over things and making me twitchy. If I'm not careful that wells up, swells up and becomes frantic and manic episodes. Where I try to Do All The Things NOW.

More than anything I'm tired of the empty places in my present and the ones I know are coming in my future.

Jim. (hug) Lots and lots and lots of : (hug)

But you're doing GREAT work, here. In case no one's told you. You loved her the right amount, you miss her the right amount, you hurt the right amount. And it changes from day to day. You're not failing at any of it. You're a good man, just so you know.

[rosefox]

There is no doing grief wrong, because there is no doing grief right, except to live through it. Grief isn't a path so much as a nebula. From the outside it might have a shape that you can sort of make sense of, but from inside it's just a lot of dust with the occasional bright spot.

Hang in there.