Helen Keller: We Bereaved Are Not Alone

 

We Bereaved Are Not Alone - Helen Keller

We bereaved are not alone.

We belong to the largest company in all the world, the company of those who have known suffering.
When it seems that our sorrow is to great to be borne, let us think of the great family of the heavy hearted into which our grief has given us entrance, and inevitably, we will feel about us their arms, their sympathy, their understanding.
Believe, when you are most unhappy, that there is something for you to do in the world.

So long as you can sweeten another's pain, life is not in vain.

Judith Viorst Remembers Those She Loved Who are Gone - But Very Much Remembered

The incomparable Judith Viorst, author of classic books for children and Necessary Losses for adults, writes in Moment Magazine about the people she loved who are no longer here, and what remembering them means. 

An excerpt:

As I count the dead, my coulda’s and shoulda’s besiege me: I should have sat with Clara and heard her stories. I should have held my baby before he died. I could have been a more welcoming sister to Lois and not been such a meanie when she cried. I could have invited my in-laws to please come inside and stay a whole week instead of a weekend. I could have made more room in my heart—and made more time in my life—for the people who came knocking at my door. I could have mustered more grace and more good humor as I barreled through my kids-career-marriage days. I could have treated my “To-Do” list as something less, far less, than a sacred document. And although I figured out some of this in time to mend my ways, the regrets I have to live with, I’ll have to live with.

Poem: Death is Nothing

 

Death Is Nothing

 

Death is nothing.

I have only walked into the next room.

I am me. You are you.

What I was for you, in your heart, I am still.

Call me by the name you have always given me.

Talk to me the way you always have.

Do not change your tone of voice.

Do not look solemn or sad.

Continue to laugh at what made us laugh together.

Pray, smile.

Think of me.

Pray for me.

Let my name be spoken at home

The way it always has

without emphasis of any kind.

Without an overhanging shadow.

Life’s significance is all that it has always been.

The seams have not been broken, the thread has not been cut.

Why should I no longer be in your thoughts

Simply because I am no longer in your sight?

I am not far, just on the other side of the road.

You see?  All is well.

Henry Scott-Holland

 

 

Don't Say "I Know How You Feel" -- Suicide Grief is Different

"Don't say, 'I know how you feel."

As much as I knew my midwife’s assistant was hurting, too, and trying to find connection, she didn’t truly understand what I was going through; I felt unseen in the complexity of my fresh grief. 

“Don’t place value judgments on the suicide, such as ‘It was a selfish choice, a sin, an act of weakness, or a lack of faith or love or strength.'”

But don’t feel afraid to say the name of the person who died, to share your memories of that person, to create space for the survivor to share their own memories, to honor their loved one’s life. Let the grieving person say what they need to say, feel what they need to feel.

[Executive director of the Suicide Prevention Network based in Minden, Nevada Debbie] Posnien suggested: “Listen with your heart, maybe hold their hand, look into their eyes, let them know you feel their pain.” Saying that you feel someone’s pain may seem similar to “I understand what you’re going through,” but those words more fully honor the complexity of the survivor’s experience — they mean “I understand you need support” and they mean “We’re going to walk through it together.”

What to Say (And Not to Say) to Someone Grieving Suicide

Talking to Children About Death and Loss in the Age of COVID-19

Families everywhere are facing loss in ways they never have before. For some, these losses are hitting closer to home with the deaths of loved ones; but all families are experiencing some amount of loss - a normal semblance of day-to-day life, the cancellation of anticipated celebrations, vacations, camps and more. As parents seek advice and resources to navigate this newly uncharted territory, they're turning to trusted brands like PJ Library to help draw a roadmap of the "new normal" of quarantine - as well as a toolkit for having more difficult conversations with children about death and dying, mourning and remembrance.

On May 6th at 3:30pm ET, PJ Library will host a public webinar, "Talking with Children about Death and Loss in the Age of the Coronavirus." This streaming video discussion will be free to families everywhere, helping them tackle one of the hardest subjects to deal with as a parent, approached through the lens of Jewish teaching and values.


Register for the webinar

When You, That At This Moment Are To Me

When you, that at this moment are to me
by Edna St. Vincent Millay


When you, that at this moment are to me
Dearer than words on paper, shall depart,
And be no more the warder of my heart,
Whereof again myself shall hold the key;
And be no more—what now you seem to be—
The sun, from which all excellences start
In a round nimbus, nor a broken dart
Of moonlight, even, splintered on the sea;
I shall remember only of this hour—
And weep somewhat, as now you see me weep—
The pathos of your love, that, like a flower,
Fearful of death yet amorous of sleep,
Droops for a moment and beholds, dismayed,
The wind whereon its petals shall be laid.

Colbert and Cooper on Grief

“You wrote me a letter after my mom died,” he reminded Colbert. “In it you said, ‘I hope you find peace in your grief.’ One of the things I’ve been thinking a lot about is how we don’t really talk about grief and loss. People are not comfortable talking about it. . . . And you’ve spoken very publicly about what you experienced as a kid — a lot of it I didn’t know. I think a lot of people don’t know. So if you don’t mind, I wanted to talk to you a little about it and sort of how it has shaped who you are now.


...

Colbert: You become a different person. . . . You kind of re-form yourself in this quiet, grieving world. . . . It became a very quiet house and very dark. And ordinary concerns of childhood suddenly kind of disappeared. . . . I had certainly a different point of view than the children around me.”

Stephen Colbert answering Anderson Cooper’s question about grief

We Don't Move On From Grief -- We Move Forward

From the author of No Happy Endings and host of the Terrible, Thanks for Asking podcast

Modern Loss: Vilomah

October is National Pregnancy and Infant Loss Awareness Month, and today, the 15th, has been designated a day of remembrance for pregnancy loss and infant death which includes, but is not limited to, miscarriage, stillbirth, SIDS or the death of a newborn.

We asked the Modern Loss community what words and phrases they use to illustrate this experience. The responses included "shattered," "homesick," "heartbreaking," and "searching." By far, though, the word with the strongest resonance is "vilomah," Sanskrit for "against a natural order." And, of course, this is the perfect term to describe the shattered dream of an eternal bond.

On this day and all others, we are sending love to all the vilomahs in our lives (and chances are great that you know more of them than you think). In this space, you will always be seen, heard and validated, and your lost loves will be missed by us all.

From Modern Loss

Jack Hamilton Says The Righteous Gemstones is a Comedy About Grief

The most hilarious and unexpectedly moving death scene you will see on television this year opens the season finale of The Righteous Gemstones, which airs Sunday night on HBO. The episode begins with a flashback to the death of beloved wife and mother Aimee-Leigh Gemstone, an unbearably sad moment for those present (her husband and three adult children) that rapidly descends into destructive chaos. The best slapstick has always been rooted in pain and a sense of cosmic injustice, and the scene, in all its uproarious brutality, finds the show’s characters processing death in a way that will feel familiar to anyone who’s lost a loved one: by flipping out and breaking shit.

Underlying the satire of megachurch Christianity is a hilarious but poignant portrait of a family coping with loss.

A Short Autobiographical Film from Matt Zoller Seitz About Loss, Grief, and Bed

Matt writes about it here.

Bill Torpy on the Death of His Son

“There’s no satisfying end to this, for anyone,” he said, looking at me, in a sleep-deprived, drug-induced, brain-swollen daze. “There’s no good end.”He continued: “Thank you, you’re a good author and thanks for the experience. There were some good characters in this.”Then he added: “Give me a hug. You don’t deserve this.”

Bill Torpy writes about his 20-year-old son's death from cancer.

"Disenfranchised Grief" -- Losing a Friend Can Be as Devastating as Losing a Family Member

The so-called hierarchy of grief, a scale used to determine who is considered a more legitimate mourner than others, puts family members at the top. For this reason, the death of a close friend can feel shunted to the periphery and has been described as a disenfranchised grief...Friends are psychological kin, that is, you may even have a stronger bond with friends than people you are related to by birth or marriage. So when a friend dies, the psychological and emotional stress can be as bad as the death of kin.

The death of a friend can be as traumatic as losing a family member

Missing a Sister Who is Still Somehow Here on Social Media

After all, if I could still see her, hear her and text her, was she really gone? If Facebook reminded me annually of her birthday and calculated the passing years into her current age, then her death wasn’t a period or an end but more of an ellipsis, and I could still imagine the “…” of a chat bubble popping up at any moment.

When someone you love disappears, there’s no finality of an autopsy report or the closure of a funeral. All you have is a lack of presence. You can piece together the mystery like in the Nancy Drew books you used to devour, but there’s no memorial service to confirm the truth. And that’s the problem: The promise of possibility, however faint, is harsher than any certainty.

It has now been five years since her disappearance, and I still fantasize about an alternate outcome. That senseless hope is hard to smother, the off-chance that someday I may see her face in a crowd, as familiar as my own reflection. I’ll run toward her and save her this time.....Facebook cannot mimic my sister’s flowery handwriting, remind me how she smelled when wearing her favorite perfume or hug me the way she used to. But it can preserve the post she left on my wall six years ago that reads, “I love you.”

Sometimes, that’s enough.

Years Ago My Sister Vanished. I See Her Whenever I Want

A Place to Leave A Memory: David Best "Temple" at the Renwick Gallery

Podcast on Grief and Loss: Terrible, Thanks for Asking

Welcome to “Terrible, Thanks for Asking,” the podcast about “the complicated nature of difficult experiences,” as McInerny says.

Each week, the podcast digs deep. It allows listeners to think about the pain we live through, how we face it, tackle it, collapse under its weight. It gives permission to grieve, to go on living, to be happy and sad simultaneously. It’s about everything that life can throw at us and the myriad ways in which we must reimagine our lives. As McInerny writes in her newest book, “No Happy Endings: A Memoir,” “death is not the only time we start over.”

And McInerny is an expert in the subject.

“Terrible, Thanks for Asking” and all that has come after was born out of McInerny’s own grief. She launched it in 2016, as a 33-year-old single mom, just two years after losing her first husband, Aaron Purmort, to brain cancer. Weeks before Aaron died, she also suffered a miscarriage and watched her father die.

Aaron’s obituary, which they wrote together, went viral, and people began contacting McInerny. “So many people . . . were reaching out to me, a complete stranger, in the middle of the night to talk about the worst thing that ever happened to them, and it wasn’t because they were all friendless or familyless,” she remembers. “It was just because the people around them were afraid to talk to them or didn’t want to remind them of their tragedy.”

Episodes include guests such as a young man with cerebral palsy; a woman who almost died in a fire that killed her boyfriend; an emergency-room doctor who watched her husband die in the hospital where she works.

Each story is filled with almost-unspeakable pain. And yet, the podcast has been listened to more than 14 million times.

Grief is a Ball in a Box

Lauren Herschel describes grief:

So grief is like this:

There’s a box with a ball in it. And a pain button.
In the beginning, the ball is huge. You can’t move the box without the ball hitting the pain button. It rattles around on its own in there and hits the button over and over. You can’t control it - it just keeps hurting. Sometimes it seems unrelenting.

Over time, the ball gets smaller. It hits the button less and less but when it does, it hurts just as much. It’s better because you can function day to day more easily. But the downside is that the ball randomly hits that button when you least expect it.

For most people, the ball never really goes away. It might hit less and less and you have more time to recover between hits, unlike when the ball was still giant

No, We Don't Get Over It and That's The Way it Should Be

Love is forever, which means loss is forever, which means grief is forever. It hurts, but it keeps us close.

We will grieve forever because we love forever. There is no end to our love for our child, therefore there is no end to our grief– not in our lifetime, anyway. We will grieve forever. We will never get over it.

The presumption is that since our child’s death happened years ago– a presumably finite event– how are we not over it by now? As if child loss is something you can get over– likening it to something far less horrific that can be conquered if you only try hard enough, think positively, or pull yourself up by the bootstraps. As if it’s a hurdle you can easily jump over, or a roadblock you can simply go around and then move on. As if sunshine, rainbows and unicorns will magically greet you once enough time has passed and you cross into “I’m-over-it” land. This may work for other things, but not child loss.

It’s time to bust a long-standing myth about child loss and grief. There is no getting over it. Child loss is not something you get over. Ever. You don’t get over watching the living, breathing piece of your heart and soul, your flesh and blood, your child– die. It’s simply not. possible. to get over the death of your child. You will grieve the death of your child until your last breath.

Why We Will Never Get Over It

When Grief Feels Like Anger

“I’m just so angry all the time, and I don’t like it. I hate how angry I am.”

I looked into her eyes and replied, “I’m not sure you’re angry. Have you ever considered that you might be grieving, that you may be in mourning right now?”

“Wow,” she said. “I never thought about it that way. That’s exactly what it feels like.”

Almost immediately she could name everything she was lamenting the loss of.

Grief looks a lot like anger on the outside.

You’re Not Angry Right Now, You’re Grieving

Poem: House Grief

I must've ordered the house grief.
That full-bodied red.
Tastes like rust, is cheap and everywhere.

Ann Alder Walsh