Grief is NOT a Group Project

There are ways in which having the right people around you can probably help a little with grief. I remember in the first few days (this is eight years ago, mind you), there were constant packages sent, emails to let me know that I was remembered and loved, notes, cards, food.

The funeral itself was a wonderful, cathartic thing. I had friends and family around me, and people did some amazing things, great gifts of service. Touched up photos of our baby, dried floral wreaths from the funeral, special memorial things. The luncheon after the funeral was filled with this strange sense of heaviness combined with laughter. I was astonished that I could be happy while I was so sad.

And then, after about two weeks, all of that ended. I remember I felt this change as a rather abrupt jolt. This was, as I look back on it, about the patience most people have with another person's grief. But guess what? Grief lasts a lot longer than two weeks.

After that first two weeks of the “honeymoon” period of grief, it became acutely painful to have any social contact with other people. I remember that for several years, I cut off one after another of the social groups I was part of, because I would go and then realize that I couldn't do that to myself. Let me explain a few of the problems I had.

When I went to the pool, where I had those casual acquaintances that you know from the gym or some place like that, I kept having to explain what had happened. These weren't people who had information about my life from any other source. And so I had to tell them one by one. Reciting the details of a terrible tragedy to the idly curious is wearing. It left me shaking after each one, and dreading ever going back to the swimming pool. Eventually, I actually switched my swimming pool membership to a different pool so that I didn't have to face people I knew at the old one anymore. It was just too awful. And at the new pool, I didn't make new friends. I didn't want to talk about it.

“How are you doing?” was the question that I would get from people who did know what had happened to me. Other writer friends, for instance, or neighborhood friends at a block party or at church. This is not the kind of question that it is useful to ask in a casual setting. The expectation is that I should say “I'm fine.” Which I did.

I became the queen of pretending that I was fine, because that was what I felt that other people expected me to say. If they really wanted to know the truth, they'd have come over to my house and sit down with me, and let me tell them the truth. But almost no one did that. I think they were afraid of me telling them the truth. I am passionate and I am articulate. And it appeared to me that other people did not like that.

There began a long period of me hating all the people with whom I shared these casual conversations, which became another reason not to seek out such contact. They demanded that I put on this role of what I called “Robot Mette” who was fine. And then they complimented me on this role. All the time. I can't tell you how many people came up to me to tell me how impressed or inspired they were by how well I was doing. And it was a lie. It turns out that when you tell people a lie that they want to hear, you lose all respect for them.

And after I stopped pretending all the time and let myself show in very small ways how I really felt, people around me were distressed to discover how angry I really was. I was so, so angry! I had not been an angry, nasty person before this and I didn't particularly like that I was an angry, nasty person now. But if I was going to be honest, which seemed part of what I needed to do to heal myself, I had to let that nastiness out. That was not something that other people seemed to appreciate, either. Why was I angry at them? They hadn't done anything! Of course they hadn't. But they weren't suffering, and I was angry at everyone who wasn't as angry as I was.

I did try at one point to attend a grief group. And I never got into it. I just didn't connect with the ridiculous pains that I saw there. Maybe that is telling about me and my impatience with myself grieving. Also, I didn't want to feel other people's pain. I had plenty of my own, thank you very much. So that was a short-lived experience. The only thing that I did on this front that helped at all was to crochet blankets for other lost babies to give to a group who worked at the hospital. But it was short-lived, again because it ended up making me think about my grief all the time and that was SO painful.

In the end, I have to say that my experience with grief was not a group experience at all. Not when it was at its worst, anyway. I was incapable of normal human social interaction. It's only now that I am able to be distant enough on occasion, and willing enough to go back to the grief, that I can talk about it in a useful way for others. And now, I find it occasionally soothing to have comments on posts, whereas seven or six years ago, I would have written something and then spent a week as a gibbering idiot, feeling like I had exposed too much of myself and any comment at all would just hurt too much.

So, that is me and group grief. Not so much. It could be that this is just my lack of normal social interaction coming to the fore again, but in case it isn't and there are others out there who are also confused by the insistence that grief be “shared,” you can join my club of angry, nasty grievers. It's not much of a club, but so it goes.