Death is hard. Grief is inevitable.
Before and after death, we can avoid, escape, rationalize, ignore, hide, fake, and deny our feelings . . . but for how long?
Before and after death, we can blame a loved one’s dying on the heath system, doctors, the presence or absence of God, chance, fate, bad luck, or pharmaceutical conglomerates . . . but will that truly help our healing?
Death comes.
Death, for the ones still living, changes everything.
Time heals.
You’ll be fine.
It’ll all get better.
Everyone gets over it.
Really?
I recall a hard week for me before I retired from hospice. It was like trudging through ever-thickening fog.
A colleague I’d respected since my first day at this hospice departed for new opportunities. Good for this person. I bid them farewell. Someone will replace them. (But how can anyone replace that specific relationship?)
Another colleague had a situation—I’ll keep this neutral and confidential—that meant not working for a stretch of time. This person wasn’t in the office for many days. I missed my co-worker.
And yet another colleague—a person with vast, professional experience—had a parent enter into our hospice’s care and the parent died in less than a week. The parent had lived a long, good life and probably nothing had been left unsaid between parent and child. But I also knew that now nothing more could be said. Professional expertise with grief is as helpful as a ladder without rungs when it’s your mother or father.
Someone I admired just entered into our hospice’s care. This person was younger than me. They possessed skills and a personality that has led to compassionately helping others in times of crisis. Now they and their family were in crisis.
We had over a dozen deaths reported and discussed at our weekly patient care meeting. Two were familiar. One was someone I’ve known for nearly four decades. We’d shared meals, laughed together, and worked on common projects. The other person, though I haven’t known as long, was about as empathetic a person as you could imagine. Both were in their mid-eighties or older, so their deaths were no surprise.
Except they were . . . to me.
I worked with the dying. I worked with death. I worked with those who grieve.
I never got used to it. If I had I would’ve quit long before retirement.
Death is hard. Grief is inevitable.
And sometimes it seems like there is so much leaving and dying and grieving. Writer Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Sorrow makes us all children again - destroys all differences of intellect. The wisest know nothing.”
I read Emerson’s brief quote at a patient care meeting—or Interdisciplinary Group (IDG)—as a preparation for one of my tasks: reading the names of those who have recently died in our hospice’s care. Hardly any of my fellow hospice professionals listened to Emerson or me, since most of the nurses and social workers and others were busy with charting. They had tasks to complete for the meeting. They had visits later in the day to dying patients.
We are all busy, busy, busy people. Why listen to a creaky quote from a long-dead writer?
I read it because I needed to hear it. Sorrow shadows me. Co-workers depart. Colleagues hurt. Friends die. Death, casual and callous, never seems to tire of it dreary chore of ending another life.
I agree with Emerson; I know nothing. Before Emerson was forty years old, his father, two younger brothers, his first wife, and his first-born child to his second wife had all died. He knew sorrow. As brilliant a writer and thinker as America has ever had, he understood the overwhelming nature of dying and death, of loss and grief.
If I know nothing, then what do I believe?
Don’t avoid grieving. I remember scheduling a bereavement phone call to a seventy-something “client” whose spouse of many years had died a few months ago. This person said s/he was fine. And kept talking to me. S/he said meeting with a grief counselor was useless. And kept talking with me. S/he said he wasn’t a joiner and didn’t like support groups. And kept talking with me. I was glad I called . . . for the person who needed nothing needed to talk.
What do you need to do to not avoid your grief? What do you need to do to avoid blaming others for a loss?
I walk my dog; exercise matters.
I make time to write; creativity matters.
I talk with my wife; support matters.
I take time in prayer; seeking the Holy matters.
I seek to make sure there are a few people around me who accept my silence and are careful with how they ask questions because they know when I am hurting; tender community matters.
It will be different for you. What you do to take care of yourself will not necessarily work for me. But, please, whatever you do, do it.
Time will not heal, for it is what we do with our time.
You will be fine again, but you will also be different because a loved one has died.
You will get better, but there is always more healing. The endless tears in the first weeks following death will be connected to the unexpected, surprising tears occurring a decade and more later.
You will never get over the death of a beloved. How can you? True love is lifelong love.
So, how was your week?
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My book, A Companion for the Hospice Journey, is available at Amazon.
Thank you. I needed that today.