The "Right Way" to Grieve

There’s no “right” way to grieve a loss—not of a job, not of a home, not of the beloved oak tree in your yard, not of a friendship that sputters and dies, not of a pet, and not of the death of someone you love.

(All of these losses are important to recognize as such. Grief is not confined to the sphere of death. What follows below, however, is in regards to death of a loved human being.)

Western society places a lot of emphasis on cultural expectation, in pretty much every area of our lives. We are exhorted to dress a certain way, wear our hair, speak, and exhibit approved behaviors to be in conformance to our gender. For example: “That’s not ladylike,” “Boys don’t cry!”, Men don’t like women with short hair,” “Masculinity means always being strong,” etc.

These statements come from centuries of conditioning and enculturation, and while individuals are (at least, as of now) free to buck them, there is no escaping these tropes’ influence upon our culture. This influence is quite apparent in the biases we have towards people who dare to dress, behave, and speak in ways that are “contrary” to the roles we have been taught belong to us.

And when we experience the death of a loved one, the culture is quick to assert itself boldly and guilt us into grieving in a particular way. In America, we are expected to “move on” within a succession of stages (I call them windows¹):

The initial window is the first 72 hours after the death. Most employed people have the luxury² of three (usually paid) days of Bereavement Leave in which we are to attend to the immediate logistics of notifying everyone, planning for a funeral and disposition, closing accounts, making arrangements for dependents’ care, and possible travel—all while navigating the intense soup of emotions that arise after a loved one dies.

Seventy-two hours. Three days. That amount of time is deemed sufficient for attending to everything needed after a death.

Spoiler alert: it is NOT enough time.

The second window starts at the end of the first. Employed folk are expected to return to the duties of their jobs. Sure, everyone at the office expects to have to walk on eggshells around you for a bit, and most will treat you tenderly (if not avoid you whenever possible so as not to be infected by your sadness). But you are expected to perform the duties for which you are being paid. Back to work!

This window has a less-defined time period. It’s anywhere from a week to a month, usually. You are expected to function at work at your usual brisk level by the end of the first week following the death. You are given a little bit of slack for your emotional state, which is still expected to be fragile, but meetings, deadlines, and work duties are not to be neglected.

Outside of work, this window is more forgiving. People are still checking on you regularly, even bringing food or helping with chores and errands. They are, at this stage, quite helpful and magnanimous with their time. Their attempts at comforting you may not suit you, but they mean well and, let’s face it, you benefit. This window holds the rawness, still, and more emotions are about to come move in with it.

Once this window with its nebulous end-time is over, the third window begins.

The third window begins without fanfare. Work is back to “normal.” Period. Where your coworkers gave you a decent amount of latitude in Window 2 if they caught you bawling in the bathroom or having a lash-out at some seemingly minor thing, once Window 3 begins, those incidents will start to work against you. You are expected to have moved on. The workplace (and the public square) leaves very little room now for emotions (and the behaviors that often stem from them) that don’t belong within its walls.

On the personal front, true friends remain helpful and at your service, both physically and emotionally. The rest start pulling back and moving on with their lives³. Acquaintances tend to avoid you if you aren’t behaving in a way that says you are trying to “get past this.” They are the ones who meet each other in passing and cluck their tongues at what an awful tragedy you suffered, but have no real patience to “deal with your sadness” right now.

Here's the thing, though. You are still raw, and reeling. Even if you do not believe this (because you, too, have bought into the culturally-mandated timeline of How Long Grief Should Last), your emotions betray you. The culture demands that we suppress our feelings of loss past a certain time, but everyone grieves differently and feelings aren’t on some stupid timeline.

A story: I took care of my aging mother on a regular basis a year or so before she passed semi-unexpectedly in 2019. She lived alone and could mostly care for herself with a little outside help, but once a week after work, I went to her grocery store and bought the items she needed, then I came to her place and cooked and ate with her, gave her a much-needed bath, spent the night, made her an absolutely necessary pot of coffee the next day, and did things like caring for her toenails, cleaning and stocking the kitchen, organizing her pills for the week, taking her to doctor visits as needed, and enjoying her company. It was a ritual we both looked forward to.

After her death, I still passed her street every Thursday on the way home from work (because the 3 days was up!), and I cried, uncontrollably, all the rest of the way home. I’m really glad I didn’t need to go into her store, because I could not do it. The thought of walking down those aisles just gutted me. (I didn’t return to that particular store for 2 years, in fact.) One day during Stage 3, I was at my grocery store near my house (same chain) and when I walked down the coffee aisle, I lost it. The smell hit me and I broke down, bawling, crumpling to the floor. People looked at me either with pity or distrust as they passed, but I bucked the cultural expectation⁴ and just let it all out in that store.

Window 3 is the classic rendering of cultural expectation slamming up against the reality of grief: it doesn’t follow a linear path, it doesn’t give a damn about culturally-expected timelines, and it will barrel down on you when you least expect it and knock you to the ground, breathless and heartbroken.

And this is all completely normal. 

You are not broken if you get triggered by the sudden smell of coffee days, weeks, months, or even years after the loss; you are not broken if you collapse right where you happen to be in that moment; you are not broken if you haven’t “moved on” in a specific window of time.

Buck the expectations—all of them, including the gender-specific ones—and feel/express your feelings, as much as is possible, when they hit, without suppressing them. If you have the privilege of being able to take more time off work, do so. (Yes, I know being at work helps distract you from the loss, but you will be better off in the long run if you do not seek out distractions right now.⁵) Routines are way more effective than distractions.

There is not one way, nor a “right way,” to grieve.

You've got this.

 

 ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 

1.)        So as not to confuse them with Elisabeth Kubler-Ross’s Five Stages of Grief, meant to describe what the dying person herself—not her grieving survivors--goes through. Also, my “windows theory” is mainly about what society expects from us, which often differs from what people actually feel and experience

 

2.)        It’s not a luxury—that’s the irony

 

3.)        Which is expected, culturally speaking, but it can still leave you bereft and lonely

 

4.)        That expectation being that tears of that magnitude, and any sort of wailing, are to be expressed in private, never in public. Public grief makes people really uncomfortable, doesn’t it?

 

5.)        The science supports this; it’s not wallowing, it’s dealing.

Knowing What You Don't Know

“Dying is a wild night and a new road.” ~Emily Dickinson

 Who am I to sit in this chair at this desk and write about what death is?

Well, who am I not to? Just because billions of words have already been constructed into prose sentences, lines of verse, graphic novels, plays and librettos and screenplays and choral masterpieces, and varied and spectacular similes and metaphors on the subject of death doesn’t mean I cannot write about it, too.

It’s not like I can write about it in such a way that you, the reader, would read it and suddenly truly understand death, anyway. I suppose I could lay down a lot of verbiage about somatic death, or what happens to the body when the brain dies and the heart stops. But I could not do this better than a lot of people already have. In other words, the facts about our death and decay are fairly* well understood by scientists, healthcare professionals, coroners and funeral directors, and researchers, at the very least.

But this missive about the one constant we all share, regardless of race, ethnicity, national origin, creed, gender, religious belief, sexual identity, social status, level of wealth, and I.Q. isn’t headed in the direction of facts about the science of the body becoming unalive.

What I want to explore is the nebulous, the liminal, the subjective, the profound, the parts of this “wild night” that are barely within the realm of comprehension, much less firmly on the surface of true understanding.

No matter what religion you are (or aren’t), no matter what you believe, or how firmly that belief has you in its hold, no matter how you try to wrap your brain around the subject, none of us really know what death actually entails, do we? Oh, we think we know! Some of you are very sure, in fact. Most people know that they don’t know, and are happy to not ever speak of it again, thank you very much. And then a small number of us know that we don’t know, but we very much want to discuss it because it is the one reality we all share—the most existential attribute that makes us human.

And when those of us in the last category get together and start talking, a lot of people find themselves quite uncomfortable, as if talking about death invites Death to come down with a gleaming scythe gripped in his bony hand to smite us. Better not to speak of it, for fear of inviting it.

Talking about death and dying does not invite death. Death will arrive when it is time, regardless of the nature of our conversations.

“Because I could not stop for Death--He kindly stopped for Me--/
    The carriage held but just ourselves, and Immortality.” ~Emily Dickinson

 

It was after midnight one warm, breezeless Spring night in 1998. In that liminal space between consciousness and deep sleep, I lay beneath the open window covered only by a thin sheet. Out of nowhere, the window blinds began to sway, pushed by air from outside, moving enough to smack the edge of the window frame a few times, which, combined with the delicious evening air suddenly flowing over my skin, was enough to rouse me. The rush of welcome air lasted about 20-30 seconds, I’d guess, and then the sultriness returned. My eyes found the cobalt numbers beside my bed: 2:17 a.m. I fell asleep.

I was about an hour into my workday the following day, chatting with a co-worker, when I asked about a former co-worker who had become a friend, Jeff, who had left our store about 3 weeks prior and was dying of AIDS in hospice not far away. “Any news?” She shook her head. Cue the day forward; I’m in the break room after lunch and she touches me on the shoulder. “He’s gone. He died last night, Frank said.” I nod somberly and she tells me the funeral information will be disseminated soon.

When I have occasion later that afternoon to ask Frank more, he tells me that Jeff went peacefully early this morning. Frank is a detail guy, so I knew he would know even more than that. “What time?”

He doesn’t skip a beat. “Time of death was recorded at 2:16 a.m. I know because my phone rang less than a minute later.”

I am a person who adores reason, who bathes in rationality, who hadn’t embraced religion or even spirituality for over a decade when Jeff died. I didn’t believe in ghosts, spirits, angels, Heaven or Hell, or anything for which no evidence existed. Though he and I shared a kinship in regards to our private lives, Jeff wasn’t a “ride-or-die” friend—we had known each other on the job for less than a year, and only at work.

But I knew, right as that time signature came from Frank’s lips, that Jeff had visited me on his way out, on his way to wherever it is he was headed. I "knew" it then, and I still "know" it now, all these years later; the knowledge mostly sits in a corner of my mind and all my other thoughts tip their hats at it from time to time and they race (or shuffle) past.

Is it explainable in rational terms? The breeze is; even “out of the blue” on a breezeless night, it is well within the realm of possibility. The timing of the breeze? Of course not. I wouldn’t deign to even try. Can it be easily dismissed as coincidence? Absolutely. Have I, someone who believes very strongly in the randomness of the world, dismissed it as coincidence? No.

“I don’t know if it is true, but it is useful.” ~Anonymous

You see, it doesn't matter what I believe, and it doesn’t matter what the real explanation is for the phenomenon that cascaded through my open window that night. I have attached a belief to it and no reason exists to dismiss that belief, despite the chances of it being a deliberate visit from the spirit of my work friend on his way out of consciousness forever being extremely slim.

It comprises part of my shelf of beliefs about death, you see. It sits there, minding its business, a small scrap in the overall file folder, a folder that grows constantly as I process more thoughts and feelings about this unknowable subject.

It’s human nature to want to know what happens to us, to our consciousness, to our non-physical being, at the moment of death, of course.

But what if an answer to this question simply cannot be found, regardless of how many words we write, conversations we have, or experiences that waft through our windows on breezeless evenings? What if we are forced to sit with uncertainty, as long as we live, regarding this question?

I’m OK with that. I hope you can be, too.

~Mailey

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

 *"We still know very little about human decay, but the growth of forensic research facilities, or ‘body farms,’ together with the availability and ever-decreasing cost of techniques such as DNA sequencing, now enables researchers to study the process in ways that were not possible just a few years ago. A better understanding of the cadaveric ecosystem – how it changes over time, and how it interacts with and alters the ecology of its wider environment – could have important applications in forensic science. It could, for example, lead to new, more accurate ways of estimating time of death, and of finding bodies that have been hidden in clandestine graves."

~Mo Costandi (The Guardian, May 2015)

Let Yourself Shatter

“On this bald hill the new year hones its edge.
Faceless and pale as china
the round sky goes on minding its business.
Your absence is inconspicuous, nobody can tell what I lack.” ~Sylvia Plath

 

If you have been alive long enough to have experienced the end of a serious relationship, the death of a friend or loved one, or have shared your life with animals for any length of time, you have known loss and you have tasted the bitter nectar of grief. It’s an intense, heavy emotion that, when it hits, often sideswipes us with its raw power.

It’s quite likely that your first experience of death was indeed the death of a beloved pet from your childhood—an event you probably recall with incredible clarity, even now, and, being human, you also remember the heart-rending pain you felt afterward (for some people, the pain is so giant that they refuse to own pets ever again). If you are like me, you still grieve at least one of your long-lost dogs—very possibly as acutely as if it just happened. The loss of a pet can be more traumatic than the grief we feel after the death of family or friends, partially because our culture makes intense grief surrounding pet loss just not socially acceptable, and partly because pets are some of our most intimate, most unconditional relationships. Those of us who share our lives with pets often experience grief multiple times over our lifetimes because pets live such transitory lives compared to ours.

Grief makes most people uncomfortable. They don’t like experiencing it, and they feel helpless when they encounter it in others. It’s incredibly awkward to be involved in some basic daily task in public and see someone who is actively grieving: we don’t know whether to ignore, try to help, or overtly avoid them. As someone who has broken down in public several times, tears streaming down my face as I sobbed uncontrollably and collapsed in the coffee aisle, suppressing the urge to wail, I have seen the looks of those nearby as I considered that I probably should “get myself together” and “not make a scene.” That’s some powerful cultural conditioning and I actively began to fight against it when my mother died suddenly in 2019.

I grew up believing that grief was a private thing, a linear thing, something to be “gotten over,” something intimate (not discussed outside the circle or after the funeral), something slightly shameful, even. This is what author Miriam Greenspan calls “emotion phobia”: a culture-wide fear of the raw power of emotion and its expression. It was drilled into most of us in childhood, sadly, though shaming, ignoring, or the threat of punishment. “Even if we were not humiliated, punished, neglected, or whipped into shape for having ordinary human feelings, by the time we are adults, we are expected to restrict their free flow…we have been taught that emotions are not appropriate except in the context of intimate relationship,” Greenspan writes in her book Healing Through the Dark Emotions.

Everyone feels awkward that you aren’t yourself anymore, so they try to buck you up with platitudes. But you don’t want to be bucked up! Your heart is broken and you just want it reassembled—but there is no way out of this black maw except through it. You cannot drown your grief, or eat/sex/drug it away, or pretend it doesn’t exist, because it is a living part of you. Stop worrying about what others, especially strangers, think--or if they feel uncomfortable. Feel your grief; reach down inside you and grip it and hold it still for as long as it takes; it writhes and bleats and it burns, even, but you must own it—completely.

And here’s a recommendation that will free you: stop saying “I’m sorry” when grief washes over you randomly and you break down! Never apologize for having feelings, especially these powerful ones that make us so human and that we have all felt at some time or another. Death and non-death loss are part of life, like it or not, and embracing your pain is the only way to find your way out of it.

 

“Give sorrow words; the grief that does not speak knits up the o’erwrought heart and bids it break.” ~Shakespeare

 

Grief is not linear; it is not “five stages” that everyone needs to follow in a certain order, and it is not shameful; it is sloppy and jagged and you will not feel large enough to contain it sometimes.

Sorrow and regret and anger run in a malevolent pack, barreling towards you, threatening to mow you over and leave you a pile of dust that could blow away on the slightest breeze. Let them! You will likely disintegrate, but only temporarily.

Author Glennon Doyle writes, “Grief shatters. If you let yourself shatter and then you put yourself back together, piece by piece, you wake up one day and realize that you have been completely reassembled. You are whole again, and strong, but you are suddenly a new shape, a new size…”

It’s been said that we do not “move on” from loss. We only move forward. The pain will indeed ease over time, but it never truly departs. Sometimes it takes up residence on the periphery of your consciousness, and other times, it comes in and sits down at the table and demands to be noticed. This is all a normal part of the healing process, which is messy and can feel unsettling.

But it does get better. Don’t be embarrassed or afraid to seek help: support groups, talking with understanding friends, practicing keening, being in nature, caring for pets and children, volunteering, exercising, eating healthfully, meditation and gratitude practices are all ways that others have healed.

You will heal, too.

"Grief is a house
where the chairs
have forgotten how to hold us
the mirrors how to reflect us
the walls how to contain us

grief is a house that disappears
each time someone knocks at the door
or rings the bell
a house that blows into the air
at the slightest gust
that buries itself deep in the ground
while everyone is sleeping

grief is a house where no one can protect you
where the younger sister
will grow older than the older one
where the doors
no longer let you in
or out.”

Jandy Nelson