It’s important to never judge another’s grief, methods, trajectory, or results. The exceptions to that are if you have reason to believe that they are at risk of harming themselves or their future, or if they specifically ask you for your help.
When helping or mentoring those who are grieving I have a simple policy of being open and accessible, but waiting for them to ask as specific question, and then answering questions with my experience and from my perspective. Because my paths through periods of very different grief were each decidedly non-linear, I bounced around and circled often, so I generally have more than one perspective to offer on any question asked. It’s important to inform, it’s important to empower, but all choices of direction, timeline and actions must be the free choice of those who are grieving. There is no one correct road in grief.
Death of a loved one is naturally very unsettling. While we may logically accept that death is inevitable and therefore unavoidable, when it comes to the lives of our loved one, many will see that death of a loved one as a punishment or a betrayal of our own trust in how we believe life will or should be. This perspective is especially the case in what we see as an untimely death. We naturally and easily judge untimely as life being unfair.
I have made the case elsewhere that both love and fairness are living human constructs that require the ability to feel, to experience emotion and to have memory and history. I also make the case for the difference between the physical existence we are born to and the metaphysical or emotional life that we build for ourselves and others with shared love.
Our physical body has no capacity for emotion and no innate capability for a sense of fairness. The sacred part of us, the human mind, is where all emotion is built and stored. The end of our physical life’s existence is determined by the rigid mechanics of our universe, not the brilliant lights of our mind’s emotions and memories that build the life we love living or the lives around us that we love loving.
I will start by saying that for those we love, every death will seem both untimely and cruel. Death will always seem unfair, untimely death will seem even more unfair. We have an emotional expectation of some quantity of life granted to us by birth, and our trust in that expectation has been broken when a life ends.
Even the death of someone suffering tragically from a painful debilitating terminal disease or a centenarian who has outlived all realistic expectations will somehow seem unfair. Another year, another day, another breath, surely our loved one deserved that. These feelings are rooted in the value we each give to life, and are especially powerful in those of us who most love life and those around us. Those who love many others, those who love their life will generally be hit harder and deeper by grief when they lose a loved one. Remember: no love, no grief, deep love, and deep grief.
My brother’s death in 2000, by suicide at age 43, was without prior warning or visible evidence of mental health struggles. Can a self-inflicted death be judged to be untimely? Suicide is an especially challenging betrayal of our trust in the value and sanctity of life, a value that we expect of ourselves and others around us, especially family and friends. Suicide is a challenging grief, because suicide challenges us to understand how someone we knew and loved came to the point where they no longer loved their life even enough to live another day. Another breath, another hour, another day and they might have avoided irreversible self destruction for the rest of their life. How is that fair?
Our son’s death in 2005, at age 20 in a firefighter water rescue training accident, was certainly untimely. He had a joy of life and an exceptional future ahead, and was suddenly taken from us. Human error and lack of proper training, planning and oversight by the department and municipality were reported as the official causes of an avoidable accident. Had he been slightly less kind, had he not switched seats with another firefighter who wasn’t comfortable, he would still be alive and another family would be grieving the loss of their child. How is that fair? His last act of kindness was his fatal decision? Had he been much less kind, he would never have chosen to be a volunteer firefighter, he might have been having a beer with friends instead of dying. His life of responsibility and kindness, his love of our community, drove him to be a firefighter, and being a firefighter caused his death. How is that fair?
My late father, a man whose life teachings to his children were rooted in the concepts of fairness, honesty and hard work, a man who had lost a son at age 43 to suicide, a man who had lost a grandson to an accidental death at age 20, lived most of his last two decades diminished by grief and unable to fully quench the anger from those deaths he judged as unfair.
As I watched grief diminish my parents, as I did my best to try to change their perspective and help them heal, I used the example of their struggles as lessons to guide my own healing from the same losses that left them perpetually wounded by grief. They did their best, they chose what they could choose, and they lived with loss uncomfortably resigned and silently. They sadly remained stuck in an exhausting isolating grief peppered with anger for the balance of their lives.
Looking back, I don’t feel that those who get stuck have somehow failed; I feel that their losses have caused them damage beyond the capabilities of their own love of life to inspire them to rebuild and to heal more fully. My parents both had carried unhealed or partially healed grief from some other past life events when these untimely deaths happened. It was indeed too much for them to heal, and they remained reticent and resistant to professional help.
They never lost a desire to live, but they lost a desire to love their life as they aged. As I watched my parents survive grief, but never thrive again, my resolve to heal more fully became stronger, and my desire to love my life again life became stronger than it had ever been before these losses.
My search for comfortable perspectives on grief has widened over decades of writing and talking on grief. My underlying understandings of my own life, purpose, love, death and grief have evolved to provide me much greater personal comfort.
We can get stuck
As an evolved emotion, grief protectively freezes and immobilizes us for a time after loss. I believe that this part of grief evolved to protect us, but also to force us to slow down to take a period of reflection while we slowly absorb the totality of the damage this loss has done to our soul and also to begin to plan our redefinition. We’re stuck in grief from day one; we must each find our own unique path to become unstuck and moving back to a life we can love again, without the physical loved one we have lost. For some grief is like quicksand, they sink slowly and can’t move or climb out of the hole they sink into.
In some discussions, I liken their early grief to a forced march around the loss. They’re always facing the loss, never allowing ourselves to look away. They step sideways, back and forth, around and around seeing nothing but the loss. Over time they wear a circular groove around the loss, sinking deeper and deeper until they might completely lose sight of the horizon where our present life is. If this circling the loss goes on long enough, the trench they wear around the loss may becomes too deep for them to climb out of without some help. Most often, they aren’t in danger, they simply can’t turn away from grief, they are afraid to walk away even for a few hours. Making grief the central focus of one’s life may become a habit for fear of forgetting, and the habit may be hard to break.
Spiritually, we need not fear forgetting, we will always have the memories and carry that love of our loved one. We may lack confidence in that spiritual connection, perhaps we’re not confident of our own soul, and so we simplify and are prone to connect ourselves and our focus to the physical body of the person that we love.
The loved we shared is based on emotions and experiences that grief will allow to remain alive and reachable inside of ourselves. The physical person has died; our love for them lives on, and a different but similar piece of that love is in each person who loved them.
Many who freeze in grief will see mostly the pain, focusing on only the short painful moments, perhaps days or months, around the death and not the entirety of the life that they loved living and being loved. People may remain frozen in grief closely surrounded by that unresolved pain and anger of early grief, as my parents did, until they themselves die. Becoming frozen in grief will make returning to loving life again more challenging or, in some cases, impossible.
Grief is never zero risk; we grieve as a small community of those who have loved someone, and we really need to remain aware of each other as we travel grief. Grief that seems untimely or unfair, such as the loss of a child, increases the initial shock and pain of grief, and increases the possibility of someone becoming stuck or even frozen in grief.
Untimely or unfair grief also increases the possibility that many of your social circle will pull away, reduce interaction or disappear over the first few months and years of your grief. No judgment, they were not prepared, equipped or comfortable enough with mortality to find ways to stay involved. Some people may have simplistic views or no actual experience with grief, some may have too much of their own grief to involve or invest themselves emotionally in your grief, and for others your grief may be their biggest fear (Natural in both loss of a child or suicide).
Remember that getting stuck in early grief is a natural result in every death of a loved one, and even long expected deaths can leave people stuck firmly in grief. Moving water never freezes solid, so often I see the aim, when helping to improve grief’s trajectory is to generate movement, but to try to avoid that circular movement where we’re always facing the loss and slowly sinking.
Be well and peaceful. Keep moving in grief, move away slowly, one step at a time. Never lose sight of the past with your lost loved one or hope for your future.