I recently listened to a radio show featuring a guest who talked about grieving. He maintained that most of us are illiterate about grief. He claimed that most people did it badly. He said we need to learn more about how to handle life's inevitable losses without resorting to escapism, denial, avoidance, isolation, addiction, or misdirected rage.
I agreed with most of the speaker's observations. And I feel that he really knocked the ball out of the park when he criticized the idea of "closure" as a myth. For example, I'm thoroughly disgusted whenever TV news anchors chatter about victims' seeking "closure" in courtrooms for their terrible and tragic losses. The talking heads' mention of "closure" is most outrageously absurd when they describe the reactions of parents to the conviction of a murderer for taking the life of a beloved son or daughter. Such moments of vengeance cannot possibly fully and finally relieve the pain of such losses.
The radio commentator went on to say that grieving is a process that must be endured, that it proceeds at its own pace no matter what the sufferer may wish, that some relief can be found by "processing feelings," sharing your pain by talking about it with others, maintaining a strong faith that the pain will abate over time, and developing a plan for replacing lost values with new and fulfilling goals and activities.
That's wise counsel, and I repeat it here once again only to endorse these ideas. But I'd like to add some observations from my own experience of losses and grieving.
When my own father died unexpectedly while I was still a young man, I learned a lot about grief on my own. I learned that it does diminish over time. In my dad's case, for example, he passed away over forty years ago, and I feel the pain of his loss far less acutely now than shortly after he passed. But time doesn't cure, or "close," such wounds. Thankfully, to a great degree they can and do heal.
Imagine that the amount of grief one will suffer from love lost can be represented as a line on a graph plotted over time. Taken at its simplest, that line would begin at left, at the point of its origin, at a much higher level than it would arrive at after a number of years. That implies a smooth and continuous rate of decline. But it's not so. Here are two critical differences:
The line of decline never can reach the baseline, never can "zero out" unless somehow the original loss is fully erased by a complete restoration - for example, when a divorced couple manages to successfully and happily reconcile.
The rate at which grief will decline is not at all smooth. Instead, it seems to bump downward in fractal waves. Rather than looking like a smooth ski slope, it more closely resembles a rock-strewn mountainside.
In my own case, for example, I would find myself suddenly and unexpectedly weeping about my loss of my father for up to a decade after his death. The frequency of such episodes did indeed decline over those first few years, but I was astounded at the unpredictable rate at which the wound seemed to reopen itself, sometimes with no provocation but an unhappy reflection. And even today, when I happen to explore my memories of times past, I still have to suppress the urge to shed a few tears about my father and what death tore away from me.
If you've suffered the profound loss of someone you loved within the too recent past, I pass on these observations to give you fair warning: be prepared for the unexpected eruption of more pain to come. Don't be embarrassed by it. Don't try to prevent it, either. It's all part of the process of grieving. Here's hoping that this will be a lesson you learn to use in the future, as you work on building your grieving intelligence.
In the meanwhile, I remain brightly yours: Mike Riley
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