Good grief

When I was 17, my grandmother died suddenly. She was the first death in my family. I think we tend to ignore grief when the loved one who dies is older, and to this day I occasionally feel a diffuse sense of shame for continuing to mourn her. Shouldn’t I have gotten over it by now? After all, older people die.

I remember a few months after her death, my mom, in a moment of frustration, told me to “get over it.” I’m 32 now, and I still miss her. The grief I feel stings less than it used to, but I think about her often, even though now she is a distant memory. I cling to memories of her, I keep photos of her around my home, and sometimes I envision walking through her house, and occasionally I catch a scent that takes me back there. She was the only person in my childhood who made me feel loved in an unconditional way, and I know in my heart she is the reason I am who I have become. 

Working in deathcare, it’s hard not to take your work home with you. When I was working in funeral homes, I often displaced the grief I felt for families with some vapid pleasantries about how the deceased lived a long life, or how loved they were, how they got to see grandchildren grow up. Those things can be true, but they don’t eradicate grief. They just obfuscate it and make it hard to feel and honor.

We don’t grieve well, and it’s because we are afraid of death. It becomes an ouroboros of avoidance; we don’t want to face death, so we don’t grieve and because we don’t grieve, we don’t want to face death. And when we don’t want to grieve, we don’t let ourselves–or others–grieve. Grief isn’t simple, but it is beautiful, even when it is painful and difficult. We grieve because we love, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t horrible or ugly sometimes. So often, though, I have overheard families cutting down grief where it grows, even at the casket in the funeral home chapel. When we can’t grieve out loud, we grieve alone, but the reality is that we don’t love alone. We love with those around us, so why not grieve with others, too?

Facing death isn’t morbid. It’s just a reality of the nature of our existence, and denying it and subsequently denying grief just creates anxiety. I am writing this as a deathcare professional with profound death anxiety. The death positivity movement doesn’t foster some kind of joy about death but rather it asks us to become comfortable with death. Comfort with death starts with healthy grieving, recognizing that grief is complex, that for some it lasts a long time, that it varies from person to person. Honor your grief. Let it sit with you. Examine it. It is part of you and part of the love you feel for those who have died.

Over the years, the pain I feel having lost all four of my grandparents in quick succession has faded. I still feel sad and there are many times I miss them in a profound way. But when I watch the movies we watched together, cook the recipes they taught me, and look at pictures of them, I feel connected to them still. Grief is a thread that ties us to those who have died. I haven’t gotten over my grandma, but I use my grief as a vehicle to keep her memory alive in my heart and continue to love her in the years after her death.