The Burden of Grief

One of the most difficult things about being grief-stricken is the many times in which you are forced because of the rules of social interaction to set aside your grief and be kind to people who are being jerks to you. Some people are being jerks because they do not know. And some people are being jerks because—who knows? You try to come up with reasons for them and excuse them in your mind because frankly, you don't have enough energy to feel your grief and also the anger for the people who are around you being jerks.

It has been some years now, and I suppose it must be some comfort to realize that the grief is gone enough that I space now for the anger. I am a little surprised that it comes back, but let me tell a few examples of things that still make me angry, after all this time.

The telemarketer who called and announced eight weeks after the loss of my daughter that she knew my husband and I had just had a baby, and she was happy to announce that we had—won a free cruise! Wasn't that great? She was so enthusiastic, and I knew that she was just a teenager trying to earn a living. She didn't know. But I said very softly, “My baby died.” I thought that would end the conversation, that she would apologize and hang up. But she didn't. She went on with her spiel. “Well, then,” she said, “you need a cruise even more, don't you?” At which point I hung up on her.

The baby formula and baby diapers company that sent us “samples” to try, along with cards of congratulations. I have no idea how they got our name and address, but I wanted so much to call someone and strangle that person. The hospital had been pretty careful to make sure that our door was marked specially so that despite the fact that we were in the delivery ward, we would not get visits from lactation nurses or any gift baskets to take home. Someone messed up here. It was likely some kind of clerical error. But the pain that came from seeing those samples in the mail box was really terrible. I didn't need new reminders, and I certainly didn't need to know that my pain was insignificant to a big company and its marketing ploy.

The person who told me confidently a story about a man who had lost his arm and learned to tie a tie with one arm faster than anyone he knew with two arms. This was, I think, supposed to be a lesson in how adversity makes us stronger and that a loss can become a gain. But for me, I kept thinking, if only I had lost an arm! I wished dearly that I had been the one to pay the price of whatever went wrong. But I wasn't. And the translation of this story still feels impossible. Do my 5 remaining children now feel like 6? Do I run faster because I lost my child? Is our house larger now because we are missing a person?

The people who assured me that they had seen my daughter in some kind of spiritual visitation. I hate to say it, but this made me angry even at the time, as much as I tried to be nice about it and nod and say thank you. I haven't seen my daughter in any spiritual visitations. I have never felt her presence at a special family event. I have never seen her as she should be at the age she would be now. And the idea that somehow she would (if there is some way in which she still exists) visit other people but not me is heart-breaking. Can you not see that your spiritual beliefs are painful to me?

The woman who told me that this was a wonderful thing for our family, because now everyone in the family would have a “reason” to be better than ever. It was as painful as a blow to the stomach, and I doubled over when I heard it. How can anyone imagine that this is a kind thing to say? You have lost a child, and now someone tells you that you deserved it because you weren't good enough, and you needed to go through this enormous pain because nothing else would make you better? I do not deny that sometimes tragedy brings out the best in people. But I have no statistics that lead me to believe this is often the case. And the idea that this was a hand-crafted tragedy designed to improve my personality is just so cruel. Could this person not see that? I would rather believe in the random cruelty of the universe than a god who shows his love this way.

A very few people were capable of making my grief feel lifted for a moment. One was a woman, a near stranger, who was a clerk at a bread store I frequented. A week after my daughter's death, I was at the counter and she commented on the bracelet I wore. It was the first time I had worn it in public, and the first time someone had commented on it. I was dumbstruck with what to say. I could have chosen to say “thank you.” Instead, I said that it matched my baby daughter's, which it did. The woman asked how old the daughter was, and I said, “She died.” The woman might have said simply that she was sorry. Instead, she burst into tears and hugged me. I felt bad that in this case, I had added to her pain, but in fact, she knew exactly what to do, which was to grieve with me.

The other instance was a friend of mine who had lost her husband to cancer in completely different circumstances some years previously. She told me a little about his final days and about how tired she was then of him being alive and how she prayed for him to die. She felt guilty about it, but she admitted this truth to me, and I was touched because of all the people I knew who talked to me about grief, she was the most honest.

Grief makes us worse than what we want to be. It makes us ashamed. It doesn't make us rise above. It doesn't make us better. It hurts us. It is a loss that we carry forever and it will never be healed. There is no magic trick to showing off how you conquered grief faster than anyone else. The only gift that comes from grief is the gift to understand the horror of grief that others feel. I cannot say that I am strong enough to be glad that I understand true grief. There are many times when I think that my knowledge of grief makes me less capable of doing anything useful because I am so overwhelmed with feeling. But since my own experience seems to indicate it is that connection that matters most, maybe this is the only gift that matters, in the end. And yet, I would still choose to go back and not go through this. I would choose not to be “improved,” not to be connected. I would choose for her to live.