As we have relegated dying to unfamiliar, barren spaces, so have we relegated grief to be a singular, solitary process. People tend to avoid grieving people in the same way they want to avoid death. Grief and death are obviously intertwined, and if you face one then you have to face the other. Grief brings on a lot of questions without answers and emotions that are hard to carry. As the lyrics from the song “It’s Quiet Uptown” in the play Hamilton state, “We push away what we can never understand. We push away the unimaginable.” It feels emotionally safer to avoid the person grieving in order to avoid the unanswerable questions and uncomfortable emotions: it is often easy to do and has become the norm of much of American Society. However, by facing and embracing grief, we could help others and ourselves find a healthier emotional place. When comforting the grieving, we help them process their emotions; build deeper relationships; and gain greater understanding for our own grieving process in the future.
Since the advent of modern medicine, the processes of death and dying have shifted from people’s homes and communities to the cold, sterile environments of hospitals and nursing homes. Before widely available assisted living and nursing homes and large-scale hospitals existed, people would be taken care of and ministered to in their homes by loved ones. Their neighbors would come by with nourishing meals and encouraging words both for the dying person and the family caring for them. When a loved one passed, their bodies would be laid out in the living room. Mourners would gather to pay respects and help bury them in the family graveyard. Death was intimate, personal, and supportive. Now, our elderly are sent to nursing homes to be cared for by strangers and die in unfamiliar, stark rooms full of beeping machines and blinking lights. According to Rose Parisi in her article on the medicalization of death and dying, “Studies have shown that about 80% of Americans would prefer to die at home; however, in reality, 60% of Americans die in acute care hospitals, 20% in nursing homes, and only 20% at home." This is in stark contrast to previous centuries. In our highly medicalized world, we’ve lost the intimate closeness to death our ancestors had. And after death, the body is sent to a funeral home, an undertaker prepares the body for burial or cremation. Everyone gathers for a funeral and then heads back to their respective isolation.
One of our challenges in facing and dealing with grief is finding or offering face to face support. Modern lifestyles lend themselves to many superficial relationships, but fewer deeply intertwined relationships. Many people don’t know their neighbors anymore. We hire others to do yard work, which keeps us from chatting with the neighbor across the yard; kids are often busy playing on sports teams rather than together in their backyards. We have thousands of “friends” on social media and a false sense of connection, but there’s little to no depth to those connections. We substitute likes, and quick comments for long conversations on the phone or over coffee. Families live far apart, and the elderly especially tend to live solitary lives. Those who grieve often don’t want to bother anyone because everyone has busy lives, and they don’t want to spill their darkness onto others. So, they isolate themselves; pretend everything is okay and try to “move on” as if nothing has happened and people are often happy to let them do so.
Both grief and death can be messy and confusing and exceedingly difficult to process. There are no easy answers, nor are there easy fixes, so the “easy” thing is to just pretend it isn’t there. Unfortunately for the griever, that just isn’t possible, not long-term anyway.
The biggest challenge to a griever is isolation. Their loved one dies; there is often a funeral or memorial service; people stick around for a few days to make sure the family or person is eating and drinking; and then everyone leaves. The grieving person is now left in an empty house with empty spaces, soul-crushing sadness, and nobody to talk to. Widowers are expected to go back to work and maintain productivity, children head back to school with expectations of high grades to make the dead person proud, and mothers need to tend to the children left behind.
Our capitalistic society hasn’t helped much. Corporations don’t offer much paid bereavement to salary people. Hourly wage earners don’t get much time off, if they can even afford it, without the risk of losing their job. An article at Zenefits.com states “The US Bureau of Labor Statistics, which mostly defines bereavement leave as time off to attend a funeral, suggests 3 days is common for immediate family and 1 day for other family members." Does anyone really believe a person who has lost their spouse or child is able to competently work three days after burying their loved one?
Sadly, once the funeral is over we tend to leave the burden of finding comfort on the shoulders of the grieving. Therapy is expensive, especially if you don’t have good insurance, and even if you do, finding the time to get there can be a challenge. Well-meaning people think a grieving person needs space and time to process. While that may be true, they also need their grief to be seen and heard. When there is nowhere to express emotion, it becomes bottled up inside. Like a volcano, the emotional pressure builds and builds until it demands a release. Often the release looks like an uncontrolled explosion of anger, intense anxiety and depression, or total mental breakdowns. What if there was a better way?
The last two years since the onset of Covid-19 have brought on much loss and, as a result, grief, both individually and collectively. Our society has been experiencing grief on a global scale. Loss and dying haven’t been able to be hidden on an individual basis anymore. Now is the time to re-evaluate how we grieve and how we support each other in grief.
What if, instead of ignoring and pretending grief isn’t there, we start asking our friends, family, and co-workers how they are doing. What if, once we asked that question, we prepared and made time to really listen? What if we stepped inside the dark with our friends and allowed them to find light in our comfort? Instead of saying “Let me know if you need anything,” you could say, “When is a good day for me to come over and have lunch with you?” or “We’d like to take care of your lawn for you this summer.”
On the other hand, sometimes helping a grieving person means stepping outside the comfort zone of doing something and instead learning how to just “be there” in the quietness. It’s easy to drop off a meal or have one delivered and think all will be okay, you’ve done your job. What can be difficult is just sitting with someone in all the uncomfortableness of overwhelming emotion and not having any answers. The truth is you don’t have to have all the right words to say. Oftentimes the person grieving just needs to hear, “Yeah, this really sucks. Go ahead and cry. You are not alone.” They just need someone to know they are sad, and that someone cares about them. This is how we begin to confront and embrace the challenging parts of grief and learn from it.
It is also time to recognize that there is no timeline for grief. Despite what many think, getting through the first year does not mean the grieving is over. In fact, sometimes, it gets worse. The first year is spent simply surviving. That year is spent anticipating all the firsts – first birthday, Christmas, anniversary, your own birthday without them, and the list goes on and on. The first year the grieving person is slogging through the mud. Everything is foggy and confusing. The brain is trying to understand this new way of being. The second year comes around, the brain is adjusting to the new normal and now the realization that they’re truly gone forever sinks in deeper. The grieving person/family is out of survival mode and into forced acceptance. Most of the support has dried up and the grieving person feels like they’re just annoying the people around them by reminding them that sometimes they are still really sad.
Changing the way we address grief includes having a longer-term mindset. Put important days in your Google calendar and set them to repeat yearly. Start reaching out more and with intentionality. Call or text on anniversaries and again ask sincerely how the person is doing. Mention the name of their loved one and a memory you have of them. Laugh about their crazy antics and share the meaningful impact they had on your life. Let them know you miss them too.
With the Covid-19 pandemic, we have an incredible opportunity to look at societal norms and make some shifts. What if one of the things we do is build relationships of greater depth - with neighbors, family, and friends? Create connections that create safe places to share and face hard things like grief. I’m guessing every one of us knows someone who’s lost a person close to them, not only from the virus but from any number of life-ending events. Let's start being more intentional about facing and embracing grief in ourselves and in others. Reach out to them. Ask sincere questions and offer space for people to be heard. Show others they are safe to grieve with you and hopefully you’ll have someone to grieve with when it’s your turn.
