Long Term Grief
An article from the NY Times was passed along from Rick Fleeter who’s in the process of publishing a new book. Given our common history of the topic of grief, we’ve corresponded about this from time to time and here is the most recent entry (released on this website because of its wider potential audience).
- – - – - -
From my eleven years of observation, I’ve mainly noticed how the impact of grief is as widely different as people are widely different and there is no ‘normal’ – though I do agree that most people are far more resilient than seems likely given immediate events.
The most noticeable distinction seems to be among those who haven’t dealt with some previous grief, like Chuck, a co-worker at Bose whose father ran off decades earlier to start a religious cult (and was subsequently imprisoned throughout most of Chuck’s youth).
Although entertaining and likable, in my experience Chuck had always been extremely cerebral, and I suspect he faced the world this way rather than face the loss of his father head on. Yet when our daughter died, Chuck came unglued — taking Jenny’s death those first few days as hard as those closest too her — if that was conceivably possible.
In reality, what had happened to our family merely cracked open what was lying just below the surface for Chuck, and once released there was no halting the eruption regarding his missing father.
Today Chuck has given up engineering and lives the life of an artist — his more genuine nature, and by finally grieving more completely, the last time I saw him he seemed much happier, fulfilled, and able to follow his dreams.
Some people might wonder why I was so public in my grief (even blogging long before almost anyone was blogging). And I kept saying how I wasn’t going to bury Jenny twice like my grandparents had buried their daughter twice.
There would be nothing left unspoken.
Apparently unspoken grief is passed unconsciously down the generations. Like Chuck, my Norwegian grandmother was also very cerebral, and the coldness and sadness of her unspoken grief was something I needed to break — all while grieving my own loss.
My grandmother never spoke of sibling deaths (my grandfather said little on any topic beyond carpentry), and when my grandparents lost her own young daughter roughly 90 years ago they hid the story from my father (an infant at the time) who only learned of his sister years later through other Norwegian relatives. We don’t know the girl’s name or where she is buried, and I doubt we ever will — and I was not about to let anything of the sort happen to Jenny.
Five years passed before I could talk about Jenny without a lightning strike jolting me back to the day of the accident. Yet passing ten years Jenny began to feel more like a part of our family history — and not so much a matter of the present. I suspect it took this long because of who I am and how I reacted my own unspoken family history.
As much as this progression has been helpful to me, I do no recommend it as a model for anyone else. There is nothing right or wrong or abnormal or routine about the progression of grief. It’s unique to each person and each person must travel their own particular dark valley.
This year, January 3rd will be the eleventh anniversary of the accident — the first time the date has been on a Sunday since the accident itself. So here, eleven years out, I have yet a new bridge to cross — and I expect not the last of them.
