Saturday
June 29, 2024 
There was a very touching story on social media, recently, about grieving and its impact. Many people responded and important points were discussed empathetically. With over 330,000 Americans dead this past year in America, grief is being dealt with everywhere.
It seems, always, fringe relatives and friends speak of the deceased when they first pass and when they are long gone. In between, fear of “going there” creates a hesitancy, leaving loved ones isolated in their great loss. My loving cousin said, “Say their name.” It’s a point we fear, but she’s right. They’re gone, but never forgotten, so we shouldn’t be afraid to remember them.
However, we’re unprepared to support dear ones through their grief. Worse, we’re unprepared for our own great grief, especially when it first hits us. Most of us don’t really know where to put the depth of loss that keeps us crying in our closet where no one else can be hurt by it. For that reason, there are workshops, seminars, and grief counselors. They are good resources, if we seek them out, but it takes time to get to that point. In the meantime, we’re winging it on our own.
Anger, the part of grief few ever mention, is also real. The writer of the social media story also talked about the unexpected, indeed misplaced, anger she felt. No one had warned her about that, she said. Personally, when my father died, I resisted the intense response to break everything around me because my family was grieving too. It was amazing to read this public piece and hear one woman’s speak of how she threw an empty water bottle at a loud, drunk airline passenger, a week after her great loss. We lose our tolerance and self-restraint, and worse, it’s unexpected.
Certainly we should all talk about grief more, but there is that fear of “going there” again. A dear friend of mine lost her adult son. He was her unexpected first born after her doctors told her she would probably never have children due to cancer surgery as a teen. She had three more in rapid succession, but losing any child is devastating. Everyone marvels at how she handles it. She carries on, still fun, funny and full of life. We can talk about him in his life; she wants him to be remembered.
In Chatterbox, we once discussed love, types of love, and the words we use to describe love. The Greeks had numerous words for love, specific to the many different types of love. Americans just “love” everything from our children to our paint colors but, obviously, it would be better if we used the Greek words to distinguish which entity we would take a bullet for.
There are different types of sadness and grief as well. We may be sad about losing our great-grandmother’s wedding ring, but we grieve the loss of someone we love. A great grief means that the love was great, and it’s imperative that we not only understand the beauty of that love but the inevitability of that loss as well.
Another recent post was from a nurse who said she feels the public has forgotten all those who are working every day with grief, as well as death and personal feelings of risk, depression and futility.
We love the front-liners in our silent despair even more than we did in our cheering and support. We can’t know their pain but understand that, on the daily, and constant, it’s greater than almost anyone’s. It isn’t that we have forgotten but, rather, that the nation’s people are mourning more and more deeply as time passes and the death toll rises. It’s impacting everyone and wearing us all down to lint.
These morbid months have silenced us all as we each carry a burden much greater than 10 months ago, but we keep all our front-line angels in our hearts, with or without the noise. We show our gratitude when we wear a mask.
Right now, there is great loss all around the world. Yes, this killer virus is responsible for much of it, but there is also still war in many nations, local civil unrest and even manufactured anger person to person, especially in America right now. Plus, death, as it always was, is still an entity; it takes no vacations. We all deal with it and grieving is a process, not a time frame.
“Happiness is choice,” my amazing friend, who lost her son, says, “but we must know it’s okay to choose it.”
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