This is social advice mostly for those who know someone who is grieving. It’s a time of year when many of us gather in celebration, so it’s timely advice.

The world around you celebrates, and that magnifies your sense of loss and diminishes your ability to enjoy the holidays. Most of us who have had significant losses will dread some part of every major holiday, anniversary and event. The discomfort fades with time, but grief never disappears.

In my most honest voice I will state, without judgment, that after we lost our son we were invited to fewer celebrations and seasonal parties. People in your social circle are uncomfortable and unsure how your grief will affect their celebration. You will bring the invisible elephant of grief to their party, and create the inevitable quandary of whether or not we talk about this loss, and what will we or they say.

Is it even appropriate to invite someone who has lost a child to a friendly Christmas party? Let me be clear, we have lost and are grieving, but we aren’t contagious with the black plague. We need to be around people, we need to re-integrate into normal social practices. We don’t require isolation. We may accept your invitation, and then not find the strength to show up, and we may avoid calling to explain.

We will notice if you don’t include us in your invitation list to a regular event that you host among friends. We know that we have changed, we didn’t choose that, and we’re getting used to that. We can’t really hurt more, but it does still hurt when the challenges that life brought to us have changed the simpler love based relationships like friendship. Friends gather to celebrate their love for each other and if we’re your friend we deserve to be part of any such gathering.

After the untimely health related death of a key employee, we were invited by his parents to their home for a family dinner. They had set a place at the table for their lost son, with a picture of him, an acknowledgement that he was still with all of us. It was a great opening to much purposeful and honest sharing of stories about the life lost.

I try to share happy stories of our son at family holiday dinners. Our grandchildren know about their uncle James, who died before they were born. They ask questions, and express that they would have liked to meet him. They recognize him in family pictures. He’s a part of us and now he’s a part of the next generation. It fosters a sense of gentle sense of meaning for any life, a sense that memories of them will endure among their children and grandchildren.  Children will one day try to grieve as they have seen you grieve. Let tears and emotion be a part of that, but also let the happy times shine over the life you loved.

My advice to those hosting parties with newly grieving people attending would be to ask their permission for you to say a few words about their loss, and end your very few words with a moment of silence. Then, the elephant in the room is no longer invisible, and everyone knows a bit about your grief. More people will talk more constructively and comfortably about life, love and inevitably grief.

We, who grieve major losses, can eventually find much greater joy in the simple basic acts of sharing love with friends.  It’s a study in contrasts, the lower your lowest point is, the higher every high point feels and the more we appreciate those joyful moments that we thought we might have lost.

So, be the good friend, don’t look for excuses. Invite those who are grieving to come and share your holiday celebration, your child’s wedding, or any excuse you may use for a party. You’ll learn much about yourself and how you view love and loss in the process, and you will have extended the gift of love of simple kindness to someone who could use some simple kindness.

Whenever trauma strikes, statistics abound. The statistical divorce rate for parents who lose a child is said to be very high. Your statistical experience may be different if you can better understand what’s happening when a couple grieves the loss of a child. Eighteen years later our divorce rate remains zero percent, but that wasn’t an easy path to follow.  

Right behind losing our son, grieving the loss of our son as a couple was the second most challenging thing I have experienced. Grief is based on personal experience and connections. For each parent, grief has common elements mixed with elements that have nothing in common with the other parent’s grief.

I will explain only my side of this experience, because primary in any loss is an allowance for each person to have their own views, their own truths, their own experience and memories, and their own deepest struggles. We may do or say things along the way that deeply offend or hurt each other unintentionally, and grief amplifies and concentrates anger and our reactions. At the same time, we may be unable to do or say things that the other parent thinks we should. There are a million points of potential anger that you will need to navigate.

Added to the challenge is the current state of your relationship at the time your child died. Every marriage has cracks in its foundation, often significant ones that we have mutually ignored for peace at the time. Any such cracks, even small ones, will get much worse with the impact of this loss and some of them will threaten your marriage.

The primary challenge is that, when we lose a child, you will each fall out of love with life for a time. Your will each struggle to redefine your own purpose and your own meaning of life, and you will each change in ways you each could never have anticipated. You will emerge after a time as two very different people who once, in an earlier life, fell deeply in love and married. But you may feel that you no longer really know the person you share your life with. Falling out of love with life means that you might fall out of love with your partner. There’s no shame, and much advantage in honestly admitting that.

It’s a massive challenge to wake up each morning surrounded by pain, to see your most loved one in such pain. Running away is a common temptation. You could feel that you would find a partner without pain, a happy person to show and teach you happiness again. But, if you do that, you will wind up with someone who will never know the real pain you have suffered, someone who will be sympathetic without ever really understanding.

Over the longer term, grief is very socially isolating. You’re changed by grief, and you no longer fit easily into the social puzzles of life. You have new emotional appendages that just don’t fit well, even with longtime friends. You are emotionally drained by the changes you must adapt to, and you must spend time and energy picking up the pieces and putting yourself back together before you can put your marriage and friendships back together.

And you will heal at different rates. Your best day yet will often collide with their worst day yet, and that flows both ways. Because you’re physically convenient, you may become the target for anger flowing freely out of you to anyone nearby. You will hurt each other at times when you are both near mortally wounded.

You may each feel responsibility differently. Parents are programmed to protect, with our life if necessary. We may each have a sense of failure, a sense of guilt for not doing more. And we are each likely to judge the other’s responsibility for this failure to protect. The failure to protect guilt is one of the most destructive in any grief, and in parental grief it can irrationally overwhelm each of us in the loss of our child.

So where do we start?

We start with honesty, with truth. We help extinguish each other’s fires of anger. We do our best to never react with anger, even to anger. We touch and hold each other. We patiently wait for each of us to unwrap and disentangle ourselves from grief. We accept each other’s truths, without demanding that they match ours. We share memories gently, knowing that for a time memories carry new pain.

I look back and see my life and marriage as two distinct periods. Before losing our son, I met and fell deeply in love with a beautiful woman. We married and had two children and built a good life together. Then life brought us the hardest challenge it could bring, our son died.

We became, through loss, two very different people emotionally. We barely recognized each other t times; we wondered what we saw in the other at times. Then we each started to slowly fall back in love with life, and we slowly became emotionally accessible to each other. As we each rebuilt and redefines ourselves, we slowly fell back into love with each other. A very different and deeper love emerged.

The deeper love of living with a survivor may be difficult to imagine early in grief. But having the opportunity of choosing someone who has survived the loss of their child, the loss of your child, you will build a love based on the deepest understanding that no matter what happens your new love will survive.

You will be there for each other, you will have experienced the worst of your lives and stayed together, and you will have a partner willing and prepared to spend the end of your lives together.

Don’t force a return to loving each other. You made a good choice when you married. Respect that and be kind when you can’t find love for each other in the middle of your pain. Be patient with emotional and physical intimacy, both of which may feel unnatural or unsatisfying when combined with grief.

I have fallen in love for a lifetime, twice with very different women in very different circumstances in our lives.  The magic is that those two wonderful strong different women inhabit the same physical body. We have embraced each other’s changes.

Be well and peaceful; love each other with patience through loss.

Anger in Grief

This is an advanced and long post. There are a few links early in the post that new followers might wish to branch off for a warm up before the main course, so that the rest of what I am saying might make more sense to you.

Anger is a common component of grief and anger is the most dangerous and destructive emotion. I commonly refer to anger as a cancer of the human soul that consumes love. Grief wounds the human soul and often cancer finds a place in a wounded soul.

In my self-developed model of the human soul https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/24/a-model-of-a-soul/, I believe that we build metaphysical connections with loved ones that allow us to give and to receive love from each of those that we love. When we are grieving, we are bleeding the life force energy of love https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/25/what-is-love/ from our soul because of the loss of a loved one, and as our reservoir of love drops anger can come to feed easily.

As we love someone longer and deeper, we establish trust. When we trust, we flow deeper love with less resistance. A special loved one dies and all of the connections we have with them, small and large, deep and shallow will bleed love from our soul towards the memory of them. The process of healing grief can reconnect those broken pathways of love to the permanent memories and monuments that we build in the gardens of our grief (insert link), and the loss of love from our own soul eventually comes to a stop.

If we consider that our soul contains only love, and is entirely responsible for our love of daily life, a sudden flow of love away from our soul can trigger panic. The loss of a deeper and more meaningful love, by its depth and breadth, can empty a soul in a very short time causing extreme anxiety and fear that can outwardly present as anger or resentment, or if internalized as numbness.

I experienced that complete emptiness after the death of our son, but at that time I had no capacity to describe or explain it, so what I felt was simply described as numbness. Numb is a common description of how many people feel when grief first sets in. Numb is often a description of the symptom of not knowing how to feel, not understanding what you feel. That’s logical because every grief is so different, a new and uncharted journey without a map. Numb is uncomfortable and unpredictable, and so, we are often made afraid and become angry by being numb.

When we internalize our anger in grief, often we are punishing ourselves for not having done more, for not doing something, for not seeing this coming, for not somehow intervening and stopping the Universe from taking this life that we loved. There’s an irrational sense of failure, of hopelessness, and of personal responsibility that is unreasonable to place on ourselves. These negative emotions can become self destructive and self defeating quickly, and they can form lasting bad habits as well,  because in our sense of failure is a sense that we might actually bear that responsibility and we twist that to we deserve to have our life punish us for the death of a loved one.

Another side effect of grief is that we lose trust in life itself. We question the purpose of the life lost as well as our own life. This is especially challenging for some who seemingly have very well defined purposes that have been derailed by grief. Grief will change how you see your own life, and questioning your own definition of purpose is a healthy and natural part of grief as you heal. But, this questioning of purpose is not wise too early in grief, because your soul is under filled with love and unbalanced to make such significant decisions competently.

The simplest explanation of the pain that we feel in grief is that we have become addicted to the love that we share with each person that we love. People who truly love life will gather love from one or many other people, from many activities and passions. The complex cocktail of love that we build for ourselves is addicting, and that wonderful addiction truly defines us in daily life. When any component of that cocktail of love is removed, we might lose the feeling and love for our life until we find ways to replace or regenerate that part of the blend of love that we live for.

That collection of love that defines our love for life is blended, not compartmentalized. So, when a significant loved one dies and our soul drains some of all of our sources of love, we can lose some or all of what defines us. Through grief, we may become someone quite different from our usual normal, for a time or for a lifetime. These changes can become negative or positive, they can redefine us as we heal, but left unchecked or unhealed they can destroy much of what we are and much of the life we love living.

In the first couple of years after our son died, I could not look myself in the eye in a mirror.  I saw that empty space, the confusion, and the destruction of so much that I had loved about life. I saw my own empty soul and wanted to avoid it. I had lost sight of my own value, a value that I had spent decades building and maintaining. My son was a large part of that value, but in those years any love that flowed into my soul drained through the wounds that his loss had left, wound that I had not healed because I did not understand how to best heal them, or even that I was the one who needed to choose to allow my soul to heal them.

While I was numb, there was very little outward anger. I had internalized it and the cancer of that anger was consuming any love that flowed into my soul. Think of it as an auto-immune reaction of the soul that was addicted to love, now unable to expand and live on the little love remaining.

As the reserves of our collected love flow out and away, we create room for that cancer of anger to come to us. The more full of love our life is, the more we become dependent on a feeling if security that an abundance of love generates in us. In grief, we sense love flowing out of us, and that triggers panic. The deeper the love, the faster that outflow is, the more we feel panic. Panic threatens us and often triggers anger.

Slowly, in spite of the serious injury to my soul, love started to collect again. I could smile, and after a time I could even laugh without guilt. My soul was healing itself. As I explored myself, modeled and explained what I was feeling, I came to understand that I could help myself to heal.  I understood that it was I who was responsible for how I would change through grief, that I could build a solid joyful memory for each of those broken pathways and that that memory would reduce the amount of love flowing out of my soul. Building good memories was my path back to live and loving life. Each fixed memory, each monument to that love built in my soul improved my feelings about life.

The vast majority of anger in grief is tied to the things that we just can’t change. It’s a lot more than simple frustration or resignation; anger is often a violent call to a forced reflection on mortality and the meaning and purpose of our own lives as well as the life of the loved one we have lost.  We are drawn into the vortex of coming to understand that love is meaningful to us, but also that love can be suddenly taken from us by any random event of the chaotic Universe. This loosens and may weaken or break some of our foundations and beliefs, upon which we have built our purpose for life.

In my writings I speak of the three choices we have as Ignore, Change, or Accept https://distillinggrief.com/2023/04/21/only-three-choices/. We can’t safely ignore the reality of the death of a loved one, and we have no capability to change death, so any death brings us to a forced acceptance of that death and the changes it will bring to our lives. It is human nature to fight or resist forced change, especially those changes that we see as negatively impacting our lives.

The question we must inevitably ask ourselves is: How much of our life, a life that we loved, are we willing to, or expected to sacrifice in memory of this death? The simplest answer I found is that the person you are grieving would be ashamed and disappointed if their death caused any damage to your life. They would not want that responsibility for any part of the ruin that you allow to be inflicted on yourself by their death.

With this perspective, it becomes your responsibility to heal and to minimize the damage to your soul and to your life. This is the foundation of what I mean when I distill grief to:

We grieve because we love.

No love, no grief

Healing your soul after loss of a loved one is a deeply personal choice.

In some traditional societies, widows will choose to identify themselves as widows by wearing only black for the rest of their lives. They literally wear the loss of their husband on their perpetually black sleeve, for life. It’s one of many examples of a grief that defines the person.

My mother never healed her soul after my brother’s suicide at age 43. She kept a fire of anger burning inside until the day she died. Her anger was directed at life, at her late son, at his widow, and it shadowed every day of her life from that point on. Her anger exhausted her, hollow out her soul and deprived her of so much happiness. Her choice, her decision was that she would never love life again, she would only pretend when she had to.

Five years after my brother’s suicide, when our twenty year old son died in an avoidable firefighter training accident, I resolved to not be angry and unhealed like my mother. I had recognized anger as the enemy of healing.

It’s arrogant to believe that the loss of a loved one is somehow meant to destroy our ability to love our life. Are we that important to the purpose of the Universe that some process decided that we would be partially or fully miserable for the rest of our life, because someone we loved reached the end of their life? And most importantly, how much pain and suffering would our lost loved one wish upon us as punishment for our having loved them?

The refusal to allow ourselves to heal is a very immature phase of grief. We are grief toddlers when we decide that if we can’t have what we wanted, what we once had, we will have an angry tantrum for the rest of our lives. It can become a bad habit that becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy as our ongoing unhealed grief makes it harder for those around us to love us. Those who don’t heal to comfort, isolate themselves using their grief as a shield from happiness that keeps our anger inside.

The human soul is where we gather and store love that we use in daily life, and love that we share with others. Anger is a cancer of the human soul that consumes love, hollowing out the person’s love for life. When your soul is wounded by losing a loved one, some of the love that defines us flows out through the wound of the loss. If we allow the anger of our grief to restrict our ability to receive love from others and from life’s activities, our soul darkens and gets colder. The cancer of anger takes root, and we get darker and colder with time.

Your soul needs two things to begin to heal. The first thing your soul needs is your conscious permission to let your soul heal, an acknowledgement that you are ready and want to heal back to loving life again. Your soul won’t force you to heal it. Your soul will respect your will to stay as you are, wounded, if that’s how you wish to define yourself. You must decide that you are ready to let your soul heal and give yourself permission to heal.

Once your soul has your permission to heal, all it needs is love. Not love exactly like the one you lost, just some love from daily life and from the people around you who want you back from the darkness of your grief. Anything that brings a smile, any activity or hobby that you love doing, you can find small bits of love almost anywhere.

As you begin repairing and refilling your soul with love, you must actively extinguish anger from the loss. Anger from loss is mostly you taking the loss personally, and expressing how it has negatively affected you. Anger completely overrides and consumes the love you had shared so well. Anger disrespects and diminishes how you have valued that love. Anger is irresponsible to the love you built together. If you choose to allow anger into your grief, you become the arsonist burning down the hallowed garden where you built love together.

Tough love ahead warning: If you wish to stay as you are, please stop here.

“It’s too hard”. It was much harder for them, they have died. You’re alive and making this all about you and your pain. It’s supposed to be all about remembering them in ways that you find comfortable and enriching for the rest of your life. You’re supposed to be doing the hard work, finding and putting the pieces of you back together into some semblance of normality.

Give your soul permission to heal, so put out the fires of your anger and get out there and collect some loving memories and allow yourself to enjoy some life again. You can do this; you’re rebuilding your soul in lasting memory of a great love that you built together.

Abject Terror

I write this just days after Hamas terrorists attacked Israel, committed war crimes, killing and kidnapping innocent Israelis, many of them young adults.

There is a pallor that sets into my life after such events because I personally know the depth of the grief that the loss of a child will bring to more than a thousand families for the rest of their lives. We naturally attach some of our love to losses that resonate with our scarred own souls. I know that anniversaries and milestones will never again have the joy or celebration that good families deserve. These families lives will always have a dark shadow, and they may struggle to see love of life, for a long time, if ever.

The world is not yet done with the losses that this event has wrought upon us. War is inevitable on multiple fronts, more innocent people wishing and trying their best to live in peace will die, more families will lose loved ones. More scarred souls and innocent victims of hatred.

I understand and speak of love as invisible life force energy, and of anger as a cancer that destroys love in our world. I speak of hatred as a metastasis of that cancer of anger that destroys societies and consumes the life force energy of love.

We will collectively grieve, we will collectively offer our thoughts, prayers and condolences, and we will soon enough disappear from those horrifically damaged lives and return to our own islands of comfortable peace and safety. We will feel good about ourselves and warmed by thinking that we have done something by caring, yet we have virtually done nothing to prevent another such event.  

We will be worn down by media coverage of the thousand of tragedies that have occurred, of images of the war being waged on terrorists, a war that will terrorize and destroy many who are just struggling to find their own peace and were caught in the crossfire between terror and peace.

These failures are our failures. We end wars in some form of tolerable but perpetually unstable peace, rather than lasting enforceable accepted peace for all sides.

Today I speak to you about resolve, because without a global resolve for peace we will always have war. There will always be the cancer of anger and hatred, so we must join together to become global oncologists for societies if we ever want a world resolved to lasting peace.

We expect too much of humanity, and we take too little responsibility, if we expect that people without options, people without hope backed into the darkest corners of the world will have the means, will and stamina to deny the tumours of terrorism that infiltrate and infect their society.

And we expect too much if we think that war will fix this. War might be the chemotherapy that kills most of the tumour, but we need the stunningly bright radiation of our collective love to follow war, to teach and build peace and security in a place where cancer thrived. We need legions of our best and most compassionate teachers to overwhelm our world’s worst failures to follow on the heels of our toughest warriors.  

A terrorist has a soul, because every human has a soul. But, the terrorist soul is devoid of any love, it is a black hole that sucks in and burns all of the love it contacts. We have no way to turn a brain tumour back to brain, and we have no ideology or methodology to turn a terrorist back to human.

So, like the malignant melanoma that once occupied my cheek, we need to as surgically as possible excise the cancer of terrorism while doing as little damage as possible to the body that the cancer chose as an innocent host. Then we must remain vigilant and ever resolve to avoid recurrence of this cancer. My cancer was simple, the cancer of terrorism is not curable, it will recur and must be better managed.

Look around the world today. The numbers of wars, the daunting numbers of casualties and displaced people represent danger. People backed into corners without hope are the most fertile ground for the seeds of terrorism.

Today, there are thousands more people who have lost hope of their lives ever being normal again. No one recovers from the loss of a child, no one recovers from the wrongful death of a loved one. We struggle, find strength, and we become powerful enough to fool you into believing that we got over it, because you’re just not prepared to handle the weight of our losses.

We need something more than your thoughts and prayers. We need your resolve, we need your interest, time, and the energy of your love directed towards the parts of the world that need your love the most.

Because, in the end, resolving to end a problem is one of the greatest forms of love, and love is the most formidable power on our planet. Let’s resolve to do better, resolve to have fewer innocent victims, resolve to excise and extinguish hatred.

Hatred will never back down, it is cancer. So, we must look hatred in the eye and destroy it with our love of life, helping others to build lives that they can love.  You have the choice between love and hate, every minute of every day. Please resolve to choose only love, make the world a better place.

September 2000, we were in Kennebunkport for a week away as a couple after a very busy and successful time in my small business. Life was good, very good. Our kids were safe at home in the care of their grandmother.

It was a blustery cool day as we walked the shore and listened to the surf.

I had a new high end (for the time) digital camera, and was snapping pictures. Many great shots, then suddenly every picture I snapped appeared strangely warped, fuzzy, out of focus. I figured some sort of mechanical or optical failure, so after more than twenty bad pictures, I stopped snapping pictures and we headed back to our hotel for lunch. As we arrived at the hotel, there was a message for me to urgently call my sister-in-law three time zones away in western Canada.

The call brought news that my brother Mike had hung himself that morning while she drove their two children to school.  Mile was a jovial, smart, driven, successful person, the guy who always had a big smile at family gatherings, who was always talking of the future he aspired to for himself and his family. No prior history of mental illness, no past attempts, no warning signs or calls for help.

The toughest series of phone calls came next. Calling our mother, father, brother, and sister with the news and tasking them with spreading the news to other relatives. Then hurried packing and an eight hour drive to our home, to our children to break the news in person before I left the next morning to see my parents in person.

By some strange serendipity, Kennebunkport was where Mike and his bride had honeymooned. Our drive home took us past many waypoints in Mikes life, places he went to school, places we had sailed together, places we had skied together, places important to our family life together.

Death triggers an exhausting flurry of social, travel, financial and bureaucratic activity. So, it was weeks later when I decided to send the blurry digital camera back for repair. I took it out and snapped a few pictures and it worked perfectly, shot after shot. In the many years I used it afterwards, every shot was great, the warped blurry images never returned in many thousands of pictures.

Only then did I connect that the time when the camera had failed was almost exactly the time that Mike had killed himself. When I thought of that, I wrote it off as coincidence. I am a technician, I am male, I am a science based person, I was not by any stretch what one could call spiritual. At that time, I had no explanation for a self-healing camera.

The coming years would change my thinking about life and love, and open understanding that would explain the phenomena I had observed with the pictures I took at the time my brother killed himself, at the time was his widow was reaching out to me for my assistance.

Two plus decades later, I am convinced that the most powerful unseen and therefore unexplained force or energy in our universe is this thing we humans call love. This book is a vulnerable sharing of my awakening and my explorations and explanations for what I have observed and felt through grief through several untimely and unexpected losses of the coming years.

Grief became my teacher, grief became my guide, grief showed me my soul completely emptied and then again overfilled. I wrote a journal, I have a near photographic memory, I remember it all and with time I could begin to put some of the pieces of what love is and what love does.

Grief is now a beautiful part of me, not just a collection of wounds and scars, but a beautiful garden that I have built in my soul for all those that I have loved and lost.  A garden where I can escape the physical world and peacefully understand that love continues long past our death, perhaps for an eternity in the souls of those who have loved us and their descendants.

We are called “Survivors of suicide” because someone we loved or knew committed suicide. When speaking or writing on grief, I focus on removal of anger as a critical step to healing. Suicide is a complex grief that makes the elimination of all anger an unreasonable expectation. Instead, we become firefighters extinguishing anger from wildfires of emotions that will follow us for the rest of our lives.

Twenty three years ago this morning, my forty-three year old brother killed himself by hanging while his wife drove their two young children to school. He had no visible or spoken warning signs, he was never under a doctor’s care for depression or mental illness, he was not a substance abuser, he was successful and employed, married once, two great kids, two living parents, three living siblings. He never reach out to any of us for help, he made the decision and took action on his own.

The survivors of suicide, for a lifetime, will suffer many additional statistical risks because on that suicide. By some small very hard to define margin we will live shorter lives. We will statistically be more prone to mental illness, with depression topping that list. We will be statistically for likely to abuse alcohol or drugs. We may struggle in our studies, or career. We may withdraw socially; there are many things most of us just can’t talk about. We will be subject to higher than average divorce rates. The list goes on.

By the actions of a loved one’s suicide, we have been sentenced to carry the grief, and the confusing emotional waves of that grief through our lifetime. And that disruption and weight will continue to bring us anger when we expect it, and when we least expect it.

Sentences beginning with “if only they had” will drag you under until you can’t breathe. If only he had called even one of us, he might be alive. If only he had sought help. If only he had felt the love we gave him. If only he could have held out for another minute, he might have changed his mind. If only a thousand or a million times, each bringing a sense of our impotence in preventing this catastrophic end to what we saw as a wonderful life.

Walking alone in our village early one dawn, I crossed paths with someone I knew and asked him how he was. His reply, looking me in the eye: “I’m going to kill myself today”. Looking into his eyes I saw what I believed to be serious risk. I thanked him for trusting me with his intent. He mentioned that through my columns published in the local paper on suicide and also the accidental death of our son five years later, he knew he could talk to me.

We spoke for half an hour, a random encounter at dawn by the side of a road. I came to understand that he had been struggling with depression for years: I had only seen the successful retired businessman, artist, husband and father that he presented as in our community. His mental illness had been addressed crisis by crisis through Emergency Room medicine and he had a complex soup of medications that collectively made him feel nothing. He saw himself as a burden on his family, the lows had become lower and the medicine held less hope.

I spent a few minutes telling him about the life of a survivor of suicide, because he intended to make his family and friends become survivors. I told him about the pain, the confusion and especially the anger he would force upon his wife, his children and his community. Then, I offered to become his friend in finding the ongoing help he needed.

Then I did something that would haunt me for a few hours. I told him it was his choice, told him to call me if he wanted my help, wished him a good day and walked away back home. I had looked into his eyes talking for half an hour, I saw light coming back to him, saw a person inside and I trusted him to do the right thing.

It was a bumpy road for him: I did virtually nothing in the journey after that talk. His wife phoned me a couple of hours later and told me his attitude had changed after I had talked with him. An immediate Emergency Medicine consult changed drugs yet again without results. A voluntary institutionalization withdrew all meds under supervision and the slowly found a balance that worked, therapy that was relevant, and most importantly ongoing support and adjustment.

In a small way, I believe I helped save a life from suicide, and the lives of many who will never know how close they came to being survivors of a suicide. I did exactly what I would have done for my brother, if only he had opened up. That brought anger back to me, the anger of knowing that I might have done something is only I had known.

Suicide is a tsunami of anger directed at oneself, and unintentionally that anger is spilled onto each and every survivor. Unless we came create an openness and approachability, we just can’t reach someone intent on killing themselves. My openness and approachability came not from my losses, but from the ability that those losses brought me to be able to speak and write openly and honestly about my grief.

If you know any survivors of suicide, keep a connection and conversation open without smothering it in worry. It begins with trust, and I believe that trust this deep relies having at least once looked into the eyes of the person who might need you. Those who intend suicide are brilliant actors, skilled liars hiding their truth. They know what they intend to do, and why. They don’t easily talk without trust.

Become the one someone could trust when they most need another human.

In another post https://distillinggrief.com/2023/05/06/what-do-i-say/ I explain some points about how to speak to those grieving, in this post I address how to understand and accept those who can’t say anything. 

Let’s face it; given a chance, people often take the easiest path. Perhaps part of our resentment of grief is rooted in the fact that we have be given no choice, that there is no easy path through this place we find ourselves in. 

It’s common that in hard situations many people will say nothing after you suffer an important loss. That lack of comment can make you angry, because surely people should say something shouldn’t they? Perhaps our expectations are too high; perhaps our understanding of their preparation and capacity for empathy and compassion is too presumptive.

Several factors play into our reaction to these scenarios of silence, the fundamental one is that the shock and pain of grief makes us extremely sensitive, it exposes our nerves. We easily find anger in early grief, and we look for places to direct and focus our anger. Often the person who says nothing is a logical target for our anger, and so we hold their silence against them. Doors close, and anger can nail them shut from either side.

Another factor is that people, in general, are not prepared to talk about loss because it’s intimate and there are too few answers. We initially see loss of a loved one as something complex that we can’t comprehend, or perhaps we hoped irrationally to avoid. It’s just too easy to come to resent those who can choose to avoid the hard parts of life that we are slogging through.

A common excuse is that they just didn’t know what to say, or they “didn’t want to make it worse”. The reality is that nothing is always the wrong thing to say, and even saying the wrong thing you are unlikely to cause more damage or make it worse.

People attend visitations without directly addressing the death, or even the life. We call it a “celebration of life” and they still remain mute and unspeaking because they don’t know what to say, no one has ever taught them how to deal with loss. They come for the food and drinks, and hope for light discussions with easy answers or talk about the weather. Again, it’s human nature to step around the hard parts.

Once we are some weeks clear of the mechanics of a funeral, those who have not yet spoken have “escaped” and only in rare cases will they break their silence. So, if they break their silence, give them a break and forgive them without need to discuss it. As they say: Better late than never.

The ones that still bother you, take the lead, be the person who breaks the silence. Do it for your comfort, not theirs. Months after our son died, I literally chased down a man who had been our neighbor. When I saw him in a parking lot, he turned away to avoid crossing paths with me. My comment when I caught up was simply “We were neighbors, we live in the same community, we belong to the same yacht club, and I understand that you don’t know what to say or how to say it, so how about we just share a hug so we can be comfortable when we next see each other?” After that hug we spoke for half an hour, we comfortably shared social space and conversations easily.

I think our hypersensitivity to others through grief, our seeking of points to place anger is all very natural, but well worth resolving so we can become more comfortable and less angry. But I think that we are right to allow ourselves disappointment rather than anger, and if we wish to we can educate and lead by example.

In some cases of silence, I have discovered that those people who don’t know what to say have had a special relationship with the lost loved one. Their loss may be deeper than our understanding, because they had a deeper relationship than we understood them to have. In grief, we become archeologists of the web of love that was shared with the one we lost, and we may be surprised or even shocked at how deeply others loved our lost loved one.

We humans, in general, feel vulnerable in loss. We distrust because we feel weakened and exposed. We expect that our loss will attract support, not drive people away. But any conversation during grief is a conversation about love lost. Men especially are reticent to engage, share a tear, or discuss feelings about love. If we can’t talk about it, grief becomes a windowless silo of loneliness.

Friends or family who can’t reach out might be friends or family at risk, so please try to find them instead of judging them. Knowing that you are strong enough to reach out will make it easier for them to open the door that should have never closed on them, the door that they should have kept open with you.

Last point is friends. Most of our friends in life are social and great fun. They signed on for that shallow part of life, not this hard part. A minority of friends, after loss, will remain or become worthy of seeing your scars, of a deep understanding of how you feel, how you think. You will be less likely to be invited to parties, your presence will often shape the party until some long time after the loss. If you’re lucky, as we were, several friends will become your new best friends and come to know you better than ever.  Often those are the friends who have experienced loss already in life, friends who understand the finite and fragile nature of life and the inevitability of even an untimely death. 

Grief changes you, you must choose how that change redefines you, you choose who you will become, you choose what and who you will love. Loss has changed your view, it has created a point where you must pivot, you must change, and you will be different.

Develop the wisdom to choose less anger and you will be better able to change positively through grief, become angry and you will diminish yourself in ways that your lost loved one would never respect you for.

Grief is the final responsibility for having loved someone, so grieve with love.

I have a fine line on my face, a barely visible scar from the corner of my left eye to the middle of my cheek, a surgery to remove a malignant melanoma. A brilliant surgeon and technology left me as close to perfect as possible while removing the risk of malignancy.

Grief wounds us, grief will leave our souls scarred, and grief will change us. These are absolutes that cannot be denied without adding danger to your grief.

I see anger in grief as a cancer of the soul. Anger is seen in the same light as that malignant melanoma that would have threatened and ended my life if I had not accepted that some pain, some discomfort, some healing, and a scar was a small price to pay for life. To heal safely, I needed to be hurt more than a simple biopsy.

Grief hurts, it’s a huge wound that we didn’t want to see coming. How we turn that hurt to safety and comfort is how we transition from being wounded to being healed, because a scar is a wound that has healed as well as it can be healed, but a wound unhealed will leave our soul broken and subject to more damage, more scarring, and prone to the cancer of anger and infection.

I spoke to my late parents weekly or more often. Twice a year, I would make a particularly difficult call to them on the birthday of younger brother and on the anniversary of his suicide. They never healed from that loss, and I compassionately understood and accepted that. So twice a year, I helped them rip open the wound and drain some of their anger.

They moved away a couple of years after Mike’s suicide to be closer to our sister, but also to find a place where nobody knew them, where they could mingle with new friends without ever mentioning or discussing that they had lost a son to suicide. Their peace was found in denial, but that denial haunted their lives.

Before they moved, my mother suffered a significant stroke one night. She refused to go to the hospital, she bullied y father and controlled the actions and news and we were kept unaware until 48 hours later. She had the medical knowledge and training to know that she had had a stroke, but she probably hoped that death would take her away from her pain, so she denied herself proper care for 48 hours and made her life immeasurably harder with partial disability.  She was either actively attempting suicide by lack of treatment, or she had come to the point where she had no love left for life because of a collection of unhealed wounds.

Months after they moved and were settled, my father had a mental breakdown and we intervened. He spent several weeks hospitalized for psychiatric care and recovered well. During his hospital stay, I phoned the psychiatrist treating him, and made him aware of my brother’s suicide. My parents had not disclosed that, they hid it. Suicide has the shadow of shame that extends far beyond the damage of losing a child, yet they didn’t tell his doctors about that important and most challenging part of his life.

Their deaths, decades later, brought them peace and freedom from both physical pain, but also the pain and anger that they carried in their souls until their last breath exhaled.

When we parent, we teach by example in two ways: We teach how to be and how not to be. When our son died in a firefighter training accident five years after my brother’s suicide, I quickly resolved to not be what my parents had become through their loss. I resolved to heal the pain to the smallest possible scar on my soul, to come back to loving life fully, to forgive those who failed my son, and to forgive the Universe and life itself.

Your soul will heal itself naturally, over time, but only if you can resolve and extinguish the cancer of anger over the loss. If anger remains unresolved, it will consume most or all of the love that naturally collects in your soul.

One of the sources of anger will be the sense that because of grief you will never be the same as you were before grief. That’s a reality that you must come to accept so that you can grow your soul around the loss of a loved one. The closing of the wound in your soul needs love, self love and gathered love, to fill that void with good memories and examples of love. That filling of the void removes all space for the cancer of anger to take root.

My cheek is missing a big deep elliptical chunk of flesh, yet there is only a tiny insignificant visible physical scar. There are invisible scars on my soul from being angry at a diagnosis of cancer, angry at the inconvenience, angry that it will hang over me in some way for life. Those angry patches have been healed with gratitude and love. I love the technology and skill than heeled me and removed a melanoma that would try to kill me. I love that it was caught early, I feel guilty at times that my brush with cancer was so simple and quick that I shy away from calling myself a cancer survivor.

You must make the choice to battle the anger from your grief. Some people will never do it, some sadly are simply too wounded and broken to ever do it, and some just run out of time to do it.

We are here to love life, to love each other. Love is what transforms the existence we are born to into a life that we love living. In all parts of life, anger is the enemy of the love we collect in our soul, and grief creates the opportunity for that cancer of anger to take hold.

Not just in grief and loss, but your life and those around you will be enhanced if you come to understand anger as an enemy of your soul. I’ve been told that anger motivates action, without anger in politics for example we would never accomplish change. I disagree and reject that thinking. We must see a greater love of life as the motivation and never allow anger to infect us for longer than it must.

Be well, seek peace, find growth through love rather than anger.

Four to six weeks after a death brings an emptiness and isolation to those closest to the death. Thus begins the dangerous times of grief when only the strongest still surround us.

There are emotional traps in grief built on perceived “normal” timelines for healing. A large part of this issue is that many see grief as a series of stages that result in some form of healing back to “normal”.

Your grief, as exhausting and overwhelming as you will find it, will often exhaust and overwhelm well meaning family and friends trying to surround and help you to heal. Without judgment I need to tell you that your grief will redefine most of the personal relationships that you have with family and friends.  

The early social mechanics of death, specifically funerals and celebrations of life, have evolved to bring us together to help share this journey into grief. These events generally happen at a time when we are emotionally numb and in shock, and our numbness is expected by those on the periphery of your grief.  A compassionate circle of support forms around us.

Typically around week three, the circle of support begins to move their focus back to their own busy lives. At about the same time, our numbness is receding and the harsh reality of the finality of this death. Our efforts to begin to unwind a life and resolve an estate are overwhelming as we struggle to find healing. Our own pain becomes a very heavy and often depressing burden. This gives rise to anger, and combined with our exhaustion we can become very reactive and hyper sensitive to what people say and do, and also to what they don’t do. An our well meaning friends are exhausted trying to help us as we only seem to sink deeper into the swamp of early grief.

As a result, by about six weeks, an isolating vacuum often forms around us and we are left mostly alone with our grief. People we see casually, even good friends return to other social activities. Weeks later, they may check back in, or bump into us on the street. They often expect us to be more healed and “normal” than we appear to them. If we sense that, we can begin to feel their disappointment and our own failure in grief, because our timeline of grief doesn’t somehow follow someone’s perception of what grief should be.

We find these expectations of timelines in many parts of society. How much paid time off does a company grant for bereavement? It’s never going to be enough in the case of loss of a child or a spouse. Going back to work might be an excellent thing to do, so long as work can adapt to your random emotional lack of availability to concentrate on a job. We might not want a surgeon or a pilot who could become emotionally overwhelmed by grief at a moment’s notice, but in the first six months of grief, sometimes much longer, we can be easily triggered to uselessness. There I go, setting an expectation of normalcy at six months when I can have no idea how long it will take me, or you to become fully functional all the time.

In my case, I owned a company and had a business to run. I had to get back to work. The reality is that in the first few years I was more creative, focused and technically productive than at most other times in my business, but looking back I also made a bunch of bad judgment calls. Had I been in a career working for others, those bad judgments would likely have cost me my job.

One reality is that grief is changing us; we are no longer the same friend we once were, and we might change shapes every time someone sees us again. Your friends feel they must tip-toe around your grief to avoid causing you hurt accidentally. You feel hurt because they don’t ask the significant questions anymore. You begin to repel each other socially, rather than the natural attraction you once shared.

These changes and differences are magnified within a marriage as two partners will grieve the same death in completely different ways and on completely different timelines.

Simplistically, your friends and family want you back, but because you grieve you are no longer the same you.  We became much closer to a few casual friends and much more casual with most of what we would have called our good friends. As I look back, the new deep bonds are mostly with people who have each, and as couples grieved complex and untimely losses. They were experienced in grief, and had now perceived timelines. Most importantly, they were fearless in conversations.

We tend to see death as failure, rather than inevitable.  This causes us to see grief in a negative context, as a part of that failure. There are parts of every death that may take years to resolve fully to comfort, things that will bring tears decades later. These are not failures, they are proof that love endures long after death.

To avoid the sense of failure, we really need to remove the perceived timelines from grief, except the timeline to extinguish anger from grief. Anger becomes the focal point of our pain, and that anger is what we need to eliminate as quickly as reasonably possible.

To avoid the sense of failure, we need to remove the stigma that showing emotion is weakness, that tears are a sign of not being whole, that somehow we expected those grieving to be “more normal” by now. The grieving can’t handle those pressures and will retreat into isolation if they sense them.

If you had a friend who suffered serious burns, would you still love them? Would you come to accept their scars? Would you be seen at a public event with them? Everyone knows how they would answer this question.  

Your friend who is grieving has suffered a catastrophic injury to their soul, but you can’t see that injury, you must get close enough feel it. Only the closest of friends will see all of your scars, only the ones you trust the most. Writing about grief, I write about my scars. I know that very few people who are grieving will write back or comment, because to do so will show me and others their scars.

I continue to write, hoping that people who are isolated in grief by the injuries to their souls might feel less alone, more comfortable, have less sense of failure, and see whatever their current state as something natural and changing.

The underlying beauty of grief is that it proves that we know how to love well and deeply. In that thought is the hope that you can find your way to remember to love yourself again and return to loving your life and those lives around you, at your pace, in your time and not on some timeline of something someone else calls normal.

Be well and peaceful, walk slowly through grief, but always toward the light of your own life.