Content Note: This post contains discussions of death, grief, and suicide.
I hate funerals. I hate being around sad people, and more than that I hate watching people be sad around me when I can’t do anything about it. But I’m also oddly enamored with spaces where people are mourning because of the feeling of finding community in shared pain.
This isn’t really a post about Kobe Bryant, but I have to acknowledge that the collective mourning and grief over his death was palpable. Definitely one of those flashbulb, “where were you when you heard” moments. I’m not really in pain about it but I know and saw a lot of people who were. And because it was so inescapable it forced me to confront my own feelings and reactions to grief and mourning in ways I don’t like to do and actively avoid. Being open about pain skeeves me out, probably because of some innate avoidance of vulnerability and Superwoman Syndrome (yeah yeah, I’ll take it up with my therapist).
See, there’s a saying about how everytime you grieve someone you’re also grieving all of the people you’ve lost before. That becomes a problem when you generally avoid feeling your grief. Because the universe has a sense of humor though, I’ve been having to help people deal with different kinds of grief during my Social Work internship. And it’s really hard to do that when you' haven’t come to terms with your own relationship to grief, so I’ve been pushing myself to transform how I relate to grief and loss, for better or worse. Mostly for worse, because grief is UGLY.
My grandmother died almost 9 years ago after a brief illness that took a turn for the worse and turned into a long decline before her death. One of my college friends died almost 3 years ago by suicide. While those are 2 completely different grieving experiences because of my relationship to each of them and the nature of their deaths, I just collapse all of it into one big "Grief Bucket” that I keep in the recesses of my mind because it’s easier that way.
Losing people is such a painful reminder of our mortality as well, that one day despite our best efforts our time on earth is over, and getting that existential so often isn’t good for me. But WHY am I so actively against the feeling of my grief? It’s not about feeling sad. I LOVE feeling sad. Having a good cry when I need it is part of my self-care. I’ll make myself cry if I need to by watching dog-owner reunion videos.
That being said, I think in the West we have a cultural lapse with how we grieve loved ones. We, and our jobs, and maybe even people around us, put pressure on ourselves to get over it as quickly as possible because we need to return to normal. We can understand that it’s okay to not be okay in the grieving process, but this is the new normal! Our lives without that person or thing is how we’re going to have to exist for the rest of our own lives,and what does that mean?
What this has all brought me to is a desire for a deeper understanding of loss, and what it means to lose something. We’re all familiar with the 5 stages of grief right?
Denial
Anger
Bargaining
Depression
Acceptance
Anyone who has lost someone close to them can tell you they’ve probably been through all these stages and probably not in that order. The funny (read: awful) thing about grief is that it’s not linear, but makes a Jeremy Bearimy shape (that’s a reference to The Good Place for all you non-watchers). Basically meaning that not only is it not in a straight line, it curves back on itself multiple times. You never know when it’s going to strike and when it’s going to feel like day 1 all over again, even after years or even decades of managing without that person.
These feelings are easy to understand when there’s a loss like a death or even a breakup, but I present an idea: accepting and creating grief rituals around other, more common types of loss in our lives can help us transform the way we grieve over death. Grief requires reckoning with the permanence of a loss, which I think is why it’s hard to acknowledge and sit with.
Learning that the thing you want to happen won’t is the most damaging part of the grief process. You won’t get that job, you won’t mend that relationship with that lover or family member, you won’t get into that academic program you were hoping for. How do we manage those feelings? They’re generally less world-changing than death, so we treat them that way. We mope for a little bit and then move on. But transforming our microgrief process can help with macro losses.
This could be something as simple as verbalizing the loss and what it means or the emotions it stirs up for us. A lot of times, we’re pushed into thinking “oh, that thing wasn’t meant for you” or “on to bigger and better things”. We just push it aside because culturally, we don’t think about holding space for dealing with loss on such a small scale. Smaller losses are generally easier to deal with and accept, but that doesn’t change the experience of the loss itself. Swallowing these small Ls like they don’t exist makes it harder for us to deal with the big ones.
So I challenge everyone reading this to start naming and feeling those small Ls. Support people in your life going through a micro loss, because accepting that pain now can help develop coping mechanisms for when there’s a big loss to deal with. Maybe it’s just a rejection email, getting curved, whatever. And don’t just talk about your L when you have something better on the other side! Because when we have big losses there is no getting another version of that person or presence. Grief is a journey towards our new normal. Understanding that we’re constantly creating a new normal in the face of less-than-ideal outcomes everyday is a perfect way to manage those Ls that we have to hold from time to time.
