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Life is so fragile.
As a counselor who works in an addiction treatment facility, I am aware of the statistics. I am aware of the fatal nature of a progressive disease when treated with painkillers, heroin, and fentanyl. I am aware that this is “what happens.” I explain this to the families and loved ones of addicts and alcoholics on a daily basis.
But as a friend (who is also a therapist) questioned in the midst of her grief, “How do we tell people about this stuff all the time and then when it happens to us it’s just so… surreal?”
I didn’t have an answer.
Last year, I wrote an article about showing up during times of grief. It got published by The Baltimore Sun and The Denver Post and I felt proud of myself for writing a piece that touched enough people to glean some real attention with publications outside of my own website.
But that doesn’t make showing up in times of grief any easier.
I can write, lecture, and talk about genuine empathy and vulnerability and showing up for those who are grieving until I'm blue in the face, but that doesn't make my own discomfort and insecurity dissipate when it's actually happening.
I scrambled to find the right words to console her. I searched my mind for the “right things to say,” empathy, sympathy, relating, flowery spiritual sayings that typically just induce anger like “they’re in a better place now,” etc. My hands froze as I stared at my iPhone screen.
“I’m so sorry,” was all I was able to muster.
But that was enough.
Is there ever a right way to grieve?
Anger, sadness, guilt, pain, humor even — in those moments when the tidal wave of grief tends to subside and everything truly feels like it’s going to be okay. And then the wave hits again, and we don’t know how to make sense of what we’re feeling.
I don’t think there really is a way to make sense of it, though.
We can understand death as best we can, even down to a neurological level.
I remember taking a training class on the life-saving drug Naloxone. Also known as Narcan, it is a drug administered by EMTs or anyone that has it on them to someone who is actively overdosing on opioids.
I watched a friend’s brother lay in the hospital on life support, brain dead from an overdose, the day before.
I somehow thought that when I took this training, it would help me to better understand the process of overdose and thus make me a little less “sensitive” to death. That it would minimize the level of confusion and anger and sadness and grief that comes with the passing of someone.
But it didn’t do that at all.
Knowing why something happens doesn’t make us immune from feeling the after-effects of the event. Figuring out why someone can’t stop self-sabotaging is not necessarily going to make them stop doing it.
We need to also look at the how:
How do we walk through this? How do we heal?
A dear friend of mine has always said, “You have to feel, deal, heal. And it has to be in that order.”
I couldn’t agree more.
There isn’t a right way to grieve.
There also isn’t a right way to show up for someone who’s grieving.
There are definitely wrong ways; seeking distraction, numbing oneself, trying to numb another, minimizing an emotional reaction, keeping oneself in denial, seeking externally to fill an internal void, and so on.
We can’t sugar coat each others’ emotional experiences.
But we can stand in the dark hole of grief with the other person and stay by their side.
And we need to remember that grief and loss are not experiences that are limited to loving someone who has passed away. We grieve and we flounder and we become emotionally untethered with any loss — relationships that have grown apart, ended, or simply just don’t exist anymore.
We can’t minimize our grief because someone “has it worse.”
Someone may always have it worse.
But all you have is your experience and pushing it down is only going to enable the emotions to manifest elsewhere and much more destructively.
And remember: Life is so fragile. It is painful, it is a mess, but it is beautiful. And it's all we've got.
