"I Don't Deserve to Feel Sad"

I remember going to a grief group once a few months after my daughter died, and I wanted so much to connect to the other women there who had all lost children in infancy or pregnancy. This was supposed to be my chance to really feel the support that I hadn’t felt at all in my church or my family about my loss.

But it wasn’t what happened at all. One woman talked about her son who had a terrible birth defect and her choice to deliver early, knowing that he would die, but also believing that he was in terrible pain. I thought she’d made the right choice, but I couldn’t see why she was still so upset about it.

Then there was another woman who had suffered multiple miscarriages and had these bizarre explanations for why they had happened, blaming various family members for thinking “bad” thoughts or for basically “jinxing” her pregnancies. She was very, very angry and I just thought she was basically crazy.

One of the rules of the grief group was that no one had to apologize that their loss wasn’t as significant as someone else’s. All our losses were to be treated equally, but I have to admit that I felt like they were all making too much out of what had happened. Why couldn’t they just move on with their lives?

It’s pretty ironic looking back on this reaction. My judgments against these women were the judgments I really had against myself and I couldn’t see that clearly. I didn’t think I “deserved” to feel sad about my loss. And honestly, I didn’t want to feel sad.

I was really upset when a few people around me tried to tell me the truth, that this would stay with me forever. I was so impatient to be done grieving. I did a long list of things that were supposed to help with grief, writing a grief journal, going to these sessions, counseling with my spiritual advisor, praying, and so on, in order to stop feeling the grief. And none of it worked. I didn’t want to be the person suffering. I wanted to be over it already.

It took a long time for me to give myself permission to be sad about what was going on. And I think this is true for many people who are depressed, particularly suicidally depressed. When we hear the message from others that we deserve to feel sad, that our loss is real, that the pet that died and devastated us, or the house that we lost to a flood, or the divorce or whatever it is that has changed out life forever isn’t something to be dismissed, there is a lot of healing in that.

I felt like there were very few people around me who were giving me that permission. And honestly, I wasn’t giving it to myself because I was so busy telling myself to get on with my life, to get through this, to move on. So, this is just to say that whatever your loss is, you deserve to feel sad. You deserve to grieve. You deserve to be angry and yell at people. You deserve to not be the good, kind person that you have been before.

And worst of all, I will say this to people who, like me, wanted to heal quick and wanted to believe they would be the same: you won’t ever be the same. I’m sorry about that. I really am. Some things about your new life may be better. You may be the kind of person who fights to make meaning out of crappy stuff. You may not be. Either one is fine.

You don’t have to learn a lesson. You don’t have to be a better person after you’ve been devastated. You can choose to make beauty out of loss. You can choose not to. And you may choose to make a different choice every day. And that’s all right. You’re human.

Your new life may never match the one that you had imagined you would have. That’s what the definition of grief is for me, this realization that what you expected to come didn’t come and you feel so keenly the dual timelines, two lives spinning out at the same time. I know some people call this denial, but I really think that’s a bad name for it. It’s a kind of deja vu, something like Sliding Doors.

It will be a long time before the life that you are, in fact, living feels real to you, and I can’t promise it will ever feel right or good. They say that grief fades, and I don’t know if that is true so much as the reality that it waxes and wanes. Sometimes you feel it just as sharply and sometimes it’s only a dull throb. Sometimes you will feel a piercing joy and then immediately afterward, you will feel guilty that you could ever be happy again.

I can’t make the journey to your future real life, easy. I can only say, welcome aboard. I’m on the journey with you, and it’s a difficult one. But it is the only one we’ve got.