Grief is a gift (and other wisdoms I never asked for)
By: Estelle Hayes
Tags: Healing, Grief And Loss, Death And Dying

It’s been four and half years since my mom died of a coronary embolism. The first was a soul-shaking blow. I left my body around the time I started talking with the police officer who would eventually break into my mother’s house and confirm that she was, indeed, not ignoring my calls and texts. It would be years before I could feel my feet back on the ground.

Watching my stepdad disappear into the physical hellscape of multiple myeloma was more of a slow burn to the nervous system. Today marks the one year passing of my stepdad from cancer but it still feels fresh. The shock of diagnosis wore off after a few weeks, only to be replaced with a manic juggling of anticipatory grief and ultimately crushing bouts of false hope. For months, spikes of cortisol and waves of depression would fight for attention like feral toddlers, until I would collapse for the evening under the familiar blanket of depression.

Compared to the sudden evaporation of my mother, his felt like a lifeforce being stolen at an agonizing pace. Loss of any significance will change you on a cellular level but the loss of a parent can really knock you off your center of gravity.

While on this grief-journey, I’ve come to some wild realizations about life, my own mortality, and the interconnectedness of all sentient things. I fell into the spiritual pool the moment that officer delivered his most sincere if not rote “ma’am, I’m so sorry to tell you…” but that’s a tale for another time.

Today we tackle a few hard-won wisdoms of early grief — a highlight reel of bullshit that people will attempt to pass off as kindness. These are fairly universal so please be encouraged to verse yourself well so you might be prepared with a hard pass when a clerk at the county morgue sheepishly hands you a trifold pamphlet entitled “GRIEF” on a piece of lavender copy paper, along with the all-important death certificate. I would have appreciated some real talk through the small opening in her plexiglass protective window while she assured me that they were taking really good care of my mom; a concept that felt wildly intimate and surprisingly comforting.

The stages of grief are bullshit

Elizabeth Kübler-Ross’s work around the “stages of dying” is important, even ground-breaking for its time but it was never meant to be a framework for actually living with grief. Claire Bidwell-Smith recently added an additional stage with her book Anxiety: The Missing Stage of Grief. And that feels right, if not a long and overdue insight.

There is a lot to be said about the rollercoaster of emotions that come with losing your person. But the idea that those experiencing loss travel through stages, as if navigating a board game, where you might end up healed at some final destination is a cruel and unrealistic suggestion. The “stages” come and go in early grief. Initially, tsunami-like waves of rage or shock may threaten to swallow you whole and eventually a familiar melancholy is more likely to creep in like a silent and all-consuming fog.

Still, somedays a grocery store jam will unearth a long-buried memory of the weekend you spent in South Lake Tahoe with your stepdad. Tony Orlando is tying a yellow ribbon around a tree and you are holding a head of lettuce crying in the produce aisle, and making strangers uncomfortable.

With the death of my mom, I experienced long stretches of denial. The aforementioned grocery store is dangerous territory in early grief — there are too many choices, sense memories around food, and landmine music triggers that will flood even a high-functioning pre-frontal cortex. It would hit me that my mom was dead and an urge to alert the unsuspecting checker of my news would wash over like it was brand new, urgent information that must get to the people.

A simple, polite “how are you today?” was met with the thought “Oh, I’m okay. But, you know, my mom died.” As if it had just happened and this stranger was an appropriate recipient of the news. Though I’d never respond that way aloud those mental tics lasted well over a year.

For weeks, I would come downstairs after getting my daughter to sleep and tell her dad that, indeed, my mom had died, shared like new information because some nights, it was.

“I know. And I’m sorry.” Quietly acknowledging my weird ritual night after night.

With the death of my stepdad, denial was replaced by unbridled rage. New to me, the desire to break things in my home and scream “fuuuuuuuuuuck” was all-consuming and completely necessary. On my birthday last year, when he was still barely alive, I sobbed like a child to a God I have no claim to — praying that we might be granted a miracle. Save this man and take something else from me. Bargaining at its finest.

These stages, or visitations, as I’ve come to experience them are always at the ready. Like a lazy Susan of day-old dumplings. Soggy and unappetizing, slowly spinning around my periphery just waiting for me to sample a taste. Depression settles in for an extended stay, acceptance makes a brief appearance, and then that new one, anxiety, pops up in the most unexpected ways. Messing with sleep one day, planting paranoid ideas about my own mortality and life expectancy the next. The point is, you’re never really done with a stage. You just sort of adjust to a life floating in and out of each one.

It doesn’t get easier with time, it gets different

No one offering the “this too shall pass” bold-faced lie knows of which they speak. If you find it written on a well-meaning card, throw it out immediately. If someone at your kid’s school starts down this path at drop off, shut that shit down before the last bell. This goes double for anyone suggesting you might feel grateful for the time you had with your loved one. Don’t take that on.

These are just a few of at least 100 dumb things people will say to you. They’ve read it in a greeting card or seen it in a bad movie and they, like most us, are doing all we can to avoid an awkward silence or extended eye contact (let alone a real, emotional connection). Keep it moving.

As my daughter so wisely said to me in our early grief, “Mommy, this is like having a scare that no one can see.” And it is. The acute pain you feel in early grief may settle into something different, but it’s with you for the days that remain.

There is a special place in hell for the greeting card aisle

I went to CVS last week when I realized Mother’s Day was lying in wait for its annual takedown. So, the hellscape on which I report is fresh.

Expect a triggering song event. But also know that you can’t ever really prepare for the nostalgia-spiked spiral brought on by a classic Hall & Oates hit. Several beats into “I Can’t Go for That (No Can Do)” and I am 12, full of preteen angst and sitting in my mom’s ’84 Honda Accord soothing myself with the radio dial.

On second thought, and I cannot stress this enough, maybe just skip this annual odyssey all together. Ask yourself, can someone else run this errand for you? Can they also sign your name, pick up stamps, address the envelope, and drop it in the mail? If so, this is the time to outsource. Call in your support.

Death anniversaries! You will think of nothing else; few will know or care

For those around you who have never lost someone close, they will simply not be aware that the anniversary is particularly hard. As in, etched in your sense memory, these days carry somatic pain that is carried in the body. It feels big and primal to you because it is. To you. But even your nearest and dearest will not have marked their calendars with the birth- or death-date of your loved ones. Don’t hold this against them. Reach out in advance to your people.

I can feel myself getting weird about a month leading up to any of these days and I’ve learned to call a friend or two and alert a specific group chat well in advance that I will be extra delicate in the coming days. Friends and family will show up but it’s on you to tip them off to your red flag days.

It’s easier when it’s unexpected

Nope.

It’s easier when you know it’s coming

Also nope.

Grief is not a gift

Don’t let any well-meaning friend or checker at Whole Foods try to sell you on either side of the “it’s easier” coin. It sucks all around. If the shock and denial doesn’t get you, the anxiety, mounting dread, and futile bargaining surely will. None of it is easy. But you will wake up each day invited to experience, process, and possibly even transform your pain into actual meaning. It will be deeper than anything you could find printed in a bereavement card or photocopied on a GRIEF flyer.

I’ll be attending several of my first-ever Zoom memorials over the coming weeks. I’ll resist the urge drop this link in the chat and talk through the finer points of “thou shalt not take your well-meaning shit” approach to grief. After all, we are collectively stumbling through this new world order and struggling to find our own ways to grieve (remotely!) as if grieving wasn’t hard enough to begin with.

But I will kindly request that you please, never, ever tell someone that grief is a gift.