Learning to Grieve

Arches National Park, Fall 2005

He was part of the family.  He was well-behaved, most of the time.  But he would bite if you played too rough.  He would occasionally play hide and seek and defy being found.  Most of the time he simply played in his room, slept in a little ball, and enjoyed eating his seeds.  Scurry was a wonderful, if not mischievous, little hamster who was my Son’s companion for a couple of years.  The little brown and white furball loved exploring his world in his hamster ball.  He would curl up in my son’s hand and be as happy as a hamster could be.  His last gift to the family was helping us understand one of the hardest of all the facts of life, life ends in death.

With Scurry’s death, our family was forced to acknowledge and learn to deal with dying.   We were sad and shared our sadness with one another.  To talked about what Surry meant to us and laughed at the time he hid out in the bottom of the kitchen stove.  We gave each other room to grieve in our own way and when it was time we buried him in a box in the backyard.  We marked his grave with a rock and discovered what life would be like in a Scurry-less family.  It was not easy, but we moved on.  Our son and daughter had had their first lesson in personal grief.

An Acquired Skill

Coping with grief (or any other type of loss) requires an important set of lifeskills.  We are not hard-wired to grieve well.  Grief is natural, but grieving is not.  It is learned and the learning can be very painful.  The skills take time to acquire and are seldom taught in schools or faith communities.  They are acquired through the family or the informal networks that comprise our village.  We learn them by observation, experiencing them ourselves, and listening as people more experienced with dying talk about what they have experienced and learned.  Coping with grief requires courage, self-knowledge, and a willingness to share our lives with others in community.

It is important that we understand that coping skills do not help us “get over” a death.  Nor will they help us “get used” to death.  They will not make losing someone we love any “easier.”  Grief hurts and every time we enter that shadowed valley we will have to find our way through it.  But, by acquiring a set of coping skills along our journey we can enter that valley knowing that we have some resources to deal with our loss.

In Hospice, I often worked with people who were preparing to lose a spouse, parent, or sibling.  It was important for me to understand their previous experiences with grief.  The people who had acquired the coping skills from previous losses would be able to lean on those experiences to get through the near future.  But the person who had a limited experience of death or who had been sheltered from the harsh reality of grief were hampered by their fear of the grief itself.  I would invariably hear them say, “I have never lost anyone before!  What do I do?  I’m lost!”  They had to go through a lifetime of skill development, acquiring some emotional intelligence, and learning to accept the “village” into their lives in a very, very short time.  No wonder they were overwhelmed!

Sometimes, all I had to do was help them remember how they had handled their previous losses.  These experiences may not have included a death, but they could have been the loss of a job, or a friendship, or a dream.  They identified what they did to get through those moments and could apply them to their present grief.  Sometimes, if they we self-aware enough, they would begin to learn from their own experiences and begin to uncover hidden resources for their impending grief.  Generally, this would ease the fear of the grief and allow them to focus more on the actual loss.

This was much more difficult after the death occurred.  The grief itself became a inhibiting factor to learning from past grief experiences.  For many people, grief is an all-consuming experience.  It is the  Big Hairy Monster (BHM) that makes it very difficult to see, process, or feel anything else.  It demands a priority of attention and will.  Thinking about other losses is too painful.  Dealing wth lesser losses seems pointless.  For some folks, grieving demands every moment of attention and intention.  When the grief itself has become the BHM , it may be time to consult with a grief counselor.

But the best way to avoid the situation described above, is to learn the lessons of grief along the way before we are forced to deal with the death of a spouse, parent, child, or very close friend.  If we pay attention to our inner life and the ways that we cope with lesser losses, we will acquire the skills, understandings, and attitudes that will help us through the major losses.  While there is nothing natural about grieving, but there is much that we can learn about it from our everyday lives.

Learning From Our Losses

We experience lesser losses all the time.  The following are examples of these lesser losses and what we may be able to learn from them. 

A word of  explanation:  It is important to remember that when we are actively grieving there are no lesser losses.  Every experience of grief hurts and is just as meaningful as any other.  The best example is losing a pet.  It can hurt just as much.  These are lesser losses, not because they hurt less (though they may), but because we will likely recover from them more quickly.  It is not helpful to discount one’s own or another’s grief.  It all hurts!

Losing a game – Children quickly learn that competitive games have winners and losers.  We also learned that winning is generally more fun than losing.  But, losing is inevitable.  Sooner or later we are going to suffer a loss.  But hopefully we will have people around us to listen to our feelings and help us find our way through the loss.  Most importantly, we learn that losing the game does not justify quitting the sport.  Losing is part of it.  

Losing a pet – Just as Scurry taught our family a lot about grief, when we lose a pet we are exposed to a broader range of grief experiences.  We may have had to go through an illness with our pet or their sudden loss in an accident.  We discover that tears are okay and a natural way to share our sadness with others.  We find that the tears will stop and that the grief is not forever.

Losing an opportunity – We experience the loss of an opportunity when we count on something that ends in disappointment.  It may not be easy to let it go and move on.  This is likely due to grief, a sadness over the loss.  In these experiences we can discover that grief does sneak up on us when we may not expect it.  We discover that it will take more than merely replacing the loss.  We must first acknowledge and process it.  It may not take very long, but it generally does require some intentional work on the grief before we can start looking for the new opportunity. 

Losing our keys – This may seem like a strange opportunity for loss but even this has something to offer our understanding of loss.  Misplacing or losing track of things we depend on remind us how much we depend on the routines in life.  We learn to keep things in their places so that we can find them when we need them.  (I generally lose my keys by placing them in my right pants pocket rather than the left.)  These sorts of losses help us to accept that there are times when our routines will not work.  We may not be able to live life as “normal” right now.  We learn to accept that the “finding” may not happen and if it does it will be in the very last place we look.  We learn patience while we await a “new normal” to arrive.

Losing a colleague or acquaintance – It happens from time to time.  A co-worker or acquaintance will either move away or die.  In these moments of loss we may feel a hole opening up in our lives.  It is generally not very deep or wide but we do realize that we may have to make adjustments.  It may miss their smiling face on the ride up the elevator.  We may have to walk by an empty desk or cubicle.  We discover that life will go on even if we need to take a brief moment to acknowledge the loss.  We also learn to share the grief of others who may have had a closer relationship with them.  In doing so we learn the value of having and sharing support.

Losing a friend – This is a far too common loss in these troubling times.  Friends are those with whom we enjoy spending time and sharing experiences.  Sometimes we lose them in death. Sometimes we lose them over arguments or disagreements.  This loss hits a little closer to our daily living.  The story of our shared past has concluded and we lament the loss of a future with one another.  We learn that we may never be able to replace a friend but we will likely have other other friends to fill some of the emptiness that comes with this loss.

Losing a job – While this may not happen to everyone, it can and will happen to most people.  This is not voluntarily leaving a job, though this can involve some grieving.  I am referring to involuntarily losing a job through being fired or laid off.  In a culture that identifies who we are with what we do, this loss may attack the core of our being.  It can leave us filled with worries over very practical things along with the loss of co-workers that had become our work family.  We learn that we have to get back on our feet as soon as possible, even while actively grieving.  We discover ways  to keep going and learn skills for getting through the day.  We may learn that there is more to “us” than our relationship to our work.  We learn that grief may have something to teach us about who we are as well as our capabilities.

Losing an ability – These losses could mean a loss of physical function like our eyesight, hearing, or the ability to walk.  They can include a gradual loss of strength or endurance.  They may include losing our ability to drive safely.  When we lose such abilities we feel the loss as a loss of self, of independence, or self-sufficiency.  We may learn that it is okay to rely on others as well as trust others to look after us.  These adjustments remind us that our future is not doomed just because we have experienced a major change.

Losing a dream – Sometimes we invest all we have into a dream.  This may be a life project or a long-awaited goal that has not yet come to fruition.  This dream may have shaped our lives, both internally and externally.  We owe much of who we know ourselves to be because of this dream.  This could be dream of being an MD or some other profession.  It may include being a loving mother.  It may be building the most successful widget company in the world.  Events may occur beyond our control and our dream becomes impossible, at least in the way we had envisioned.  In these moments of loss we may discover the importance of balancing our expectations with our situation.  We may learn that the loss of a dream does not have to equal the loss of our life.  Change, while not wanted or desired, can be endured.  We can adapt.

Losing an extended family member – The loss of a grown sibling, aunt or uncle, cousin, or niece or nephew can be devastating.  But there is generally enough distance from the deceased to realize that other’s grief may be more profound than our own.  We may even learn that in caring for others we help deal with our grief as well.  Further, by being one step removed from the intimate family circle, we can observe and learn from how other grieve.  This is particularly true for children as they observe their parents dealing with the deaths of their parent, especially if the child did not have a close relationship with their grandparent.

Life-Lessons Abound for Those Paying Attention

This list is not intended to be an exhaustive list of lessons to be learned in these losses.  They are merely suggestions of the skills, insights, and attitudes that can help us learn to deal with our own grief.  A lifetime of losses can make our lives more resilient to the pain of grief when it occurs with a loss of a spouse, parent, or child.

The learnings listed above will not make the loss any less bitter or easier.  But, they may help us cope more effectively.  They may help us to realize that we have faced something similar before and survived.  They may remind us of the skills that got us through the last time we grieved.  They will help us face the BHM so that we can focus on the grieving itself.  

There is no way to be prepared for a major loss in our lives.  When it arrives we will enter a new place for our lives.  We likely have what we need for our journey.  We have a lifetime of losses that have taught us that grief hurts but it can be endured.  We have gradually come to know that a day will dawn when our first thought will no longer be of what we have lost, but of the life that awaits us in a new day.  Until that morning arrives, we can build on a lifetime of learning to help us cope, a lifetime of relationships to support us, and skills to deal with whatever stresses come along. 

The little “furballs” in our lives have much to teach us if we will pay attention.

Blessings,

Bob

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