Being Broken

I get uncomfortable when people ask me for my “advice” about how to deal with grief. This is because I feel that there is a cultural imperative that grief must be “dealt” with. It must be silenced. You must learn to say that you are “over it,” that you are “healed,” that you have “moved on.”

I admit that when I first was struck by grief, there was nothing I wanted more than to push it away and not experience it. I tried that for a long time. For years. And guess what? It didn’t work. The grief would bubble to the surface, coming out in unexpected and frightening ways. It demanded to be felt. It demanded to be heard.

Then I went through a phase where I felt like there was something wrong with me, that I couldn’t say that I was “getting better,” that I was “healing,” or that I was, at least, not “broken” anymore. The cultural narrative I felt pressed upon me was the one in which someone is struck by grief and grows from it, becomes stronger. There were so many instances of this all around me. People who got cancer and came back from it fighting. People who lost a limb and started training for a marathon. They were *better* from their grief because they knew how to turn grief into a heartwarming lesson. They were “examples” for us all, “inspirations” for the rest of us who couldn’t get over grief.

And now, I am strong enough that I can articulate clearly why I feel that this is so wrong and so harmful to people who are grieving and who will ALWAYS grieve. There is nothing wrong with grieving. Yes, it hurts. Yes, it changes us. Sometimes it changes us for the better. Sometimes it doesn’t. But that doesn’t mean that grief should be put away. And to me, it doesn’t mean that grief is something that one “gets over” or “puts away.”

I am broken. I am still broken. Maybe I refuse to heal. Maybe there is a willfulness in my decision not to be whole again. I don’t know. It doesn’t feel that way to me. It feels like something happened to me and I was wounded and my refusal to pretend not to be wounded is something that my culture resents. I am supposed to be whole again. I am supposed to give lessons about my experience so that other people who are grieving can see the way to go. And that isn’t the way that it works.

How do you get through grief? I don’t know. There aren’t any secrets, any shortcuts. There aren’t any easier paths. You get through it your own way, whatever that way is. You get through it crying, resentful. You get through it in bed, if you can’t get out. You get through it out running because it’s the only thing that makes you feel like yourself again, or because the pain feels right, feels deserved.

I became an obsessive triathlete. Does that mean I am an “inspiration” to other people? It makes me acutely uncomfortable when people say that. I did what I did. I am who I am. I’m not healed. I didn’t recover from grief through my training. I am still grieving. I am still broken. I think I always will be. I don’t know that I will be. I hold open the possibility that I may change, but I don’t insist on it.

And that is, I suppose, the only piece of advice I ultimately have to give to people grieving. Don’t force yourself to do what doesn’t feel right, and don’t let other people tell you how you feel. You tell them. If you are still broken, you are. If they don’t want to mourn with you, they don’t. But because they want you to tell a story of healing doesn’t mean you have to. You don’t have to become an object lesson for them or an inspiration for other people. Your grief is yours and you get to decide what it means and how it feels to you.