June 30, 2010
from the comments
Pam:
For months after my little brother died I remember wanting to carry around just this sort of sign that I was grieving. It was perpetually amazing to me that when I went out in public, strangers would have no idea that I had suffered a loss. I was being treated as a normal person by grocery clerks, telemarketers, panhandlers. This was almost obscene to me. The pain I was in seemed to me to be warping the walls of my house. It was just amazing to me that it was possible for someone not to know.
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Deron, thanks for lifting this comment out; I have experienced the same.
When my daughter Justine died, I felt grotesquely deformed; I kept expecting strangers to gasp in horror whenever they saw me, and I felt guilty for being the monster, grief incarnate, among my friends and family. I felt obscene. The only thing more horrible than me would have been a whole room full of people like me, which is why I couldn’t do the support group thing. I’m glad such groups help some people, but for me it would have been a complete horrorshow. Love and therapy and journaling and time passing patched me back together again; now the loss of Justine is a very bad thing that happened, not how I define myself.
Even now, I find myself getting ready to click away before submitting this post, because I don’t want to bum out the flock — but it seems to me that being part of the flock means putting the hairy stuff out there, not just reading what the rest of you have written.
Robin, I am sorry to learn that you lost your daughter. It saddens me, but it does not bum me out in the why’d-you-have-to-go-and-bring-that-up? sense. You are right about putting the painful stuff out there, although it is by no means expected or required or some kind of clusterflock initiation rite. I just think that the nature of the group is such that active participants eventually reach a point at which they feel they want to share things that cut deep emotionally.
I think one appeal of public signs of formal mourning is something that you and Pam and others have touched on — the acute awareness one has of being set apart, an awareness so intense it is quite literally physical. I was struck by Pam’s observation that her pain over her brother seemed to be warping the walls of the house and by your speaking of yourself as ‘grief incarnate’. I recall that abnormalities of vision and hearing have accompanied my own experiences of shattering loss, and I think that one’s sense of the world as an alien place and oneself as an alien being within it are two sides of the same coin.
For that reason it makes sense to me to adopt some outward sign of mourning that everyone recognizes and respects, and it seems too bad that many cultures do not do this anymore.
Thank you, Robin. This isn’t depressing; it is graceful and uplifting and honest and beautiful.
Robin, thanks for sharing. As Sheila said your story is moving and sad but not depressing in the, ‘why’d she go and do that’ sense. I think I’ve mentioned before that Alicia will sometimes feel guilty about talking about her dad’s death (if I could convince her to comment here she’d probably have some very interesting things to say on grieving) and has developed a defense mechanism in which she mentions his death rather bluntly catching those who might just be learning of it by surprise.
Thank you for sharing that, Robin. I never find myself irritated or depressed when people talk about their grief or loved ones they’ve lost– more often than not, I’m honored that they would share something so deeply personal and painful for them. I can’t imagine that’s easy to do.