An Invitation to Grieve Fearlessly

Grief can be frightening, but there is nothing to fear.

For most of my life I’ve been frightened of grief. The death part, of course, but also the emotional experience after the death; of losing and being left. I was afraid of surviving in the aftermath of loss and being expected to cope. I imagined being alone with a whirlpool of sadness, inevitably drowned. But just like death itself, there is no outrunning the experience of grief. I was 37 years old when grief threatened to flood me; after a year of battling my husband’s addiction he entered rehab again in April, in June we euthanized our 14-year-old family dog, and in August my father died.

I know that I am not alone in my fear because I live in America, where we make little space for grief. We abhor aging, erase our elders (except, curiously, the ones we elect to government office), and have very few rituals and stories to support those in mourning. Although the loss of a loved one is a universal and unavoidable experience, we panic when searching for the words to comfort one another. We do not support parents in taking time off when they bring life into this world, so of course there is little care given to those who see a loved one off. We are phobic of painful emotions as a rule, and grief is no exception. We show up to the funeral, but then we stop checking in.

By the time I was seven or eight, I was already anticipating the eventual loss of my grandparents and parents. Even at that young age, I had a sense that some losses must be insurmountable, a thought like, “When my grandmother dies, I won’t survive it.” The idea of losing my parents was further inconceivable. I laid awake at night worrying about how it would feel to be untethered, already aware that losing parents must be like losing roots. Without them, I would surely float away, both un-grounded and directionless. It was terrifying.

Decades later, working as a mental health therapist, grief remained one of the conversations that I avoided whenever I could. I was happy to talk with a client about their heaviest traumas, their sex life, or their bowel movements, but I did not trust myself to know what to do what when someone lost a loved one. Just as a claustrophobic individual would not be helpful with your fear of elevators, I was not able to help anyone with an emotion that I was afraid to sit with. I could not be helpful with someone in their grief if I could not imagine a path forward, in which they were at peace again.

There was not one particular moment that I became more accepting. It happened somewhere along the way, between the outrage I felt at a toddler’s funeral where the pamphlet said, “Heaven needed another angel” and the suffocating distress of walking away from my uncle’s casket and imagining him, anyone, lying alone in the cold soil. As I waited from a plane ride away as my beloved grandmother finally passed away, over twenty years after I first began worrying about it. When despite the heartache, I wished that I could have been with her to hold her hand as she took her last breath. And let’s not forget grief’s most cunning sidekick, regret, which I felt after my grandfather went in for a surgery and did not wake up. How I wished I had anticipated that possibility and sent him off with a hug and an “I love you.”

Through sheer exposure, I have learned that grief is not a whirlpool, it’s a wave, and like any emotion, I can drop anchor and weather the storm.

It is clear to me now that I was fearful of grief because I had no framework to make sense of the experience of death, and I had no models for how to cope effectively with overwhelming emotion. I was not raised in a religious household, a fact that I do not regret now that I am older. But when I was younger and grappling with grief, I wished I had a story to soothe me. My mother always told me that no matter how old we are when we die, in Heaven, we are all thirty years old, a belief that gives her some peace to this day. In her mind, there are no children waiting for their earth-bound mothers, and none of us carry our broken bodies across the pearly gates.

I never found much peace in religion, but my experiences in psychotherapy as both a therapist and a client have shown me that emotions are not dangerous or factual. And after every experience of loss, I also witness the recovery; myself and others, the part that had previously seemed unattainable. I know that it is possible to die of a broken heart, in more ways than one. But I’ve yet to witness it for myself, more often, I stand in awe of the human capacity to make meaning of pain and continue forward. We are capable of withstanding so much more than I ever thought possible and whereas once I wondered how any of us could survive grief, I now know that we are designed to do so.

It is a cold and snowy January of the first new year after the loss of my father. The new year serves as a metaphorical door that only some of us get to walk through, leaving our lost ones behind. My childhood fears have come to pass, and it has hurt. It still hurts. And yet, I am not un-tethered. What I did not know at the age of 6, what none of us can know, is that as we mature we will grow more roots.

I have become more comfortable with uncertainty, even the uncertainty of what happens to us after we die. I teach my therapy clients that certainty is actually a feeling, not a fact, and we do not need to feel certain in order to take our next brave step.

And now that I have children of my own, I have tried to be both a model for grieving and a container for their emotional overflow. I cannot take away the pain but I can demystify the process. I hope that when they see me crying, and we talk about it, that it gives them permission to feel their own sadness, without fear that it will engulf them. I want them to know that I am their mother and I am not afraid.