3 EASY Tips for Dealing With Unconsolable Grief
Ok so this is ultimately an uplifting piece — but FYI my mother died 3 years ago today. She was an absolute joy and perfect mother, although not a very public person. Rather than continue to eulogize her today, I want to share how reconciling this grief came close to destroying my relationship with reality, of which I’ve already written publicly at length. [TLDR there’s a familiar litany of depression, substance abuse, narcissistic career dissatisfaction, motorcycle trips through Cambodia, financial irresponsibility, all while chasing the wildest parties on earth.] However, thanks to generous family, friends, and (eventually) therapy — I’ve held things together. Sitting here today, I can finally welcome joy into my life without guilt.
In that spirit, there are three things I’d like to share — with hope they can be of some comfort to anyone whose purpose in life became unmoored through grief.
1. Acknowledge Your Grief has Precedent
Grief is relative and isolating, until you suddenly find someone who “gets it.” Losing a mother to cancer (like I did) is a different kind of pain than losing a family member who “flies off the motorcycle handlebars … right at a horse’s ass and gets his head stuck in it.” This is not to say that grief must be compared. Rather, we must acknowledge that we are not alone in our grief. Humanity is vast, and a fine teller of sad stories.
So while it can be painful, seek out these stories and share your own. Occasionally someone or something will swell up and articulate feelings you couldn’t possibly articulate on your own, like this piece from the Guardian that docked in my timeline this week, and is worth quoting at length:
Two dear friends of mine lost their mothers this month, a high school friend and an old love. I’ve been sitting here trying to write condolence cards to them, but the inadequacy of everything I’m trying to say, especially having lost my own mother 18 months ago, is leaving me stymied.
“I’m so sorry you’ve lost your mother,” sounds like they might have left her at the mall or in their other pants. It doesn’t even begin to convey what I understand about losing your mother, that even if her death came peacefully after a long struggle, it still feels like a wrenching severance, an amputation.
We have not “lost” our mothers. We say that to be polite, but in truth, we have become un-mothered, like Marie Antoinette was un-headed or that wilderness hiker who sawed off his arm was un-handed. It feels violent. It feels raw and fundamental, a pain that reaches all the way down to your ligaments and bones. Our mothers were our first firmament, literally, our first homes, the universe from whose substance we were formed.
And while this is a pain that all creatures who are born must face, it does not make saying goodbye to your mother any easier to do.
To my grieving friends I would say: “Brace yourselves.” Grief on this scale is like a physical object that the body must expel.
Ah shit. Yup. That’s what it feels like!
2. Write Shit Down or Grief will make You Forget
As Millennials, we pride ourselves on “valuing experiences & memories” which sounds pretty awesome when it’s tripping shrooms with your roommate at Electric Forrest, but spreading the ashes of a cremated loved one is a different type of “experience.” In my experience, grief clouds our memories unlike any other emotion. In the days and months after my mother’s passing, I might as well have ceased to exist, because I possess no memory of this time. That’s why my #1 advice to anyone experiencing grief: WRITE SHIT DOWN.
You’re entitled to regrets in life, but please don’t make the mistake of wading through grief without the fortitude to learn something from it. Writing (just for yourself) can be scary, but ultimately will help connect your past with your future.
Here’s a few excerpts from my journal (just a hidden GoogleDrive folder). It gets dark in parts. But TBH, going back now I had COMPLETELY forgotten most of this stuff. Now, it’s helping me reshape and contextualize the way I deal with pain:
2/14/13 |12:49am | Manhattan
Found out today (well — yesterday now) that mom is going to die. They have decided to stop chemo and move her into hospice care in the house. Dad said “about a month” but who knows what that means. I really don’t know how to process this stuff. To be completely honest, I just want it to be over. I want her to stop having to deal with so much pain. And such a long painful half-goodbye. And that right there — that sliver of a line between wanting the best for others and wanting the best for ourselves — is the guilt that I will never be able to shake.
7/9/14 |12:05am | Manhattan
watching divergent and realizing that’s me. last two days i haven’t left the apartment, save a trip for doritos. so depressed. body hurthing. i went to hard on the boat. what is wrong with me. igorning emails. i’m too special to want to be special just let me be. self aware of every cliche just let me be. fuck this city and my hot sweats and adrian grenier and my purple sheets and veronica roth and the erudite and my iphone. just want to be in the backyard in batavia watching fireflies with mom, dad, and em, and chuck. that’s all i want. please save me.
12/29/14 | 12:40am | Chicago
Seriously contemplating not getting on the plane back to NYC. Hungover all weekend. Good. I need to crash. But when I do crash it’s gonna be bad. Real bad. Ugh I just want to stay home with Dad and Chuck. But what would I really accomplish by skipping NYE? I need ot make money. I need to be back in NYC. Should I take my cello? Why am I so depressed? The day after the day. I have so much guilt. I am such a fuck up. Damnit.
freaking out right now so much. panicking. but can’t isolate the reason. i know it’s dangerous to go on this trip. i know it’s dangerous to try to keep living in nyc. ugh i hate this right now.
3. Find Silly Rituals to Acknowledge Grief
To explain what I mean by “rituals,” please indulge in another great passage from that Guardian piece about mourning in the 21st century:
Over the course of the first year, I became quietly obsessed with Victorian mourning customs. I checked the calendar periodically to see at what points it was appropriate to exchange black crape for bombazine, at what date the black ribbon should be taken down from the house’s front door, and how long as a male member of the family would it be appropriate to wear a black armband or hat band, a signal to the world that says: “Be kind to me. I am in pain.”
Nowadays, of course, we don’t do any of that. We take a few days off of work and then we’re back in the game, ready or not.
We’re left to wander back into the world, where everything looks the same, but for us, every movement and every breath feels weighted down by this suffocating cloud of sadness. What are we supposed to do with that? How are we to function?
For a while, I functioned as I thought I was supposed to. I pushed the grief deep inside of me and returned to work. But Freud got the best of me.
Somewhere in the past year, I started to do this thing where I’d jump in the air and take a photo. My dad called it “Evantating,” but I shortened to #levantating and now whenever I go to a new city I try to find a place. Every time, I think about my mom. How she would call at just the right time. How there’s so much more of this world I need to share with her.
In her absence, I’ll continue this silly little ritual. And if you lose someone close to you, I hope you’ll find a ritual of your own.
