Sometimes Well Wishes Sting Deep
Today would have been my dad’s 61st birthday. Someone posted this on his Facebook page today:
“Life isn’t about your age. Life is about living. So when your birthday comes be thankful for the year that has just passed and anticipate with a happy heart what the coming year will bring.”
Talk about a god damn gut punch! Life is about living, and dad is dead! The year that has just passed has taken us another trip around the sun without him. The year ahead will do the same. Our bodies age with each passing moment, the changes of life swirling around us and dad will forever be 58, stuck in the past. Life continues in his absence. We make memories and snap images, learn and grow and ride the waves of change, carrying him, carrying our grief of him with us.
Grief has a way of making things like this cut deep, stinging inside our wounds that will never completely heal. Most people mean what they say with the best of intentions, not understanding how the grieving may receive and interact with their words.
In early grief this happens all too often. When we are engulfed in a nightmare, time moving slowly while we struggle to take each breath. As the foggy dream engulfs us we are bombarded by; “He’s in a better place.”, “Thank God he’s no longer suffering.”, “At least you had the time you had with him.”, “He wouldn’t want you to be sad, be strong for him.”. What are meant as condolences are spit out as misconstrued platitudes that ease the consoler more than the one needing to be consoled.
Positivity culture has created an emotionally challenged monster of humanity, where we are told to hide and suppress the unpleasant emotions and refocus on only feeling happiness. When faced with grief and all it stirs up, we can have a hard time sitting with and processing our own feelings, let alone being able to sit with others in theirs.
What we all really need in the beginning is the freedom to fall apart, along with small acts of kindness and love that slowly put us back together. More than words, we need communion. We need a hug we can melt into and let the tears fall. We need to be fed a meal or handed a cold glass of water or a warm mug of coffee. We need to talk about what happened and reminisce about the past. We need to curl up under a blanket in awkward silence, allowing our memories to surface and swirl in our heads. We need to be able to feel it all, no matter how difficult or uncomfortable it may be. Being told not to be sad or “at least” anything is only discrediting our true human experiences. All emotions are valid, and loss brings some intense ones to the surface. Grief however, has a way of forcing us to sit with them until they subside temporarily, coming and going in waves. Avoidance only fuels the fire of pain and suffering, prolonging the process and holding back healing.
But when we learn to sit in the midst of it all, we begin to learn that the tide will always rise and fall, no matter how painful it may become, we can survive it all.