Why I Work with Grief

I spent years not speaking about how badly it hurt. Years of grief and heartache were hushed up and hurried away — first by folks who meant well but couldn’t stomach it, then by myself, in surrender. Occasionally I’d write something about it. Now and again I’d share some sad song lyrics. Mostly though, when it came to that pain, I embodied the Midwestern culture where I was raised:

“Nothing you can do about it…”

“Well, crying doesn’t help.”

“It could be worse.”

“At least…”

I learned, like so many of us do, that bottling up how I felt was not only easier for me, but easier for, it seemed, everyone.

It hurt their feelings when I talked about my childhood best friends — dead at 17 and 24. They imagined their own friends and children. There were platitudes and quick dismissals. Spiritual bypassing and distraction.

It hurt their feelings when I would talk about my father — the way he was shrinking and dying, slowly but purposefully, for so many years. It hurt their hearts to think about their parents, their kids, themselves — suffering in the way Alzheimer’s makes folks suffer. It hurt them to know so much of my story — that three of the four people who raised me would die in the same nursing home less than 2 years apart — two of them with concurrent Alzheimer’s. It hurt them to know that things only got more complicated from there.

“Oh god, I just can’t imagine.”

Often while crying, less for me but for the heartbreak of imagining themselves in my shoes, I received their message, over and over, that my grief, my particular flavor of depression and existential dread…was exhausting and sad. Trying to explain the situation was depleting, and I mainly felt met by polite avoidance. Over and over and over the message sounded like, “You seem fine, and this pain is sharp and too close to home — can you do this somewhere else?” It felt like a burden to ask folks to look at death in a way that felt anywhere close to my reality. To be with me in grieving the people I had simultaneously lost and was still losing. To hold me in my true feeling that the manner of their impending deaths felt brutal and punishing.

Eventually, I got tired of folks crying at me when I asked for support, and tired of feeling like I had to take care of them when they did, so I stopped talking. I brought the grief and depression to therapy — one of the few places I felt comfortable enough to be authentic about the misery of terminal illness and ambiguous, anticipatory loss.

When it was finally over, I had spent nearly a decade thinking critically, daily, about grief. There turned out to be meaningful gains inside all the losses. I was comfortable sitting with death and terminal illness. I was (mostly) not afraid to be with the grim isolation of our existence. I felt comfortable talking to friends about hospices and caretaking as their families grew ill. I had experience that felt worthwhile to share.

In the adaptive survival of living in a culture that avoids and disavows death and loss as a matter of course, I realized I had grown the capacity to build a life supporting folks in doing the opposite. My story was simultaneously unique and not altogether uncommon. The time I spent staring at death (as a means to help myself) could be meaningful and supportive for folks struggling similarly. I could support folks who might also struggle to rectify being (at least) tenuously committed to living in a world in which not only will we die, but the longer we survive, the more losses we accumulate. I could support folks who are meeting or preparing to meet death and loss in the reality of their daily lives. I could support folks who need a space to talk about the brutality of their cumulative experiences of death and loss without having to caretake for their listener.

When it was finally over, grief/death/loss work felt like work I could do, and work worth doing. So, it’s the work I do.

I do other things, of course. Not all of my therapy work (nor my life as a whole) is centered around grief and death and loss. Most of it probably isn’t. But this is where I come from. This is the frame. This is how I got into and how I see the work. Even when we are not discussing it, death is in the room. My clients and I often don’t talk much about death every session. But when it comes, as it always does, I offer a space to be with it together. To be seen and held within the grief and pain and relief and sorrow and confusion and isolation. That’s the work I try to do now. I am trying to be the person I needed then, for the people who still need it now.