In my newsletter this week, I wrote about the different ways Mother’s Day might be a difficult day for you – if your own mother died, if your child died, if you lost your partner with whom you co-parent, lost the sibling with whom you shared a parent, if you’re mourning the loss of your own fertility, if you had a less-than-optimal relationship with your mother.
It was a pretty long list of possible ways grief might show up. Still, I heard from some folks who were upset I didn’t mention their specific mother-related loss.
The truth is, Mother’s Day is a made up holiday loaded with losses of all kinds. In addition to all the losses I mentioned, I heard from people saying Mother’s Day hurt because their husband died, and no one else cares that it’s Mother’s Day. Or their families have changed so much, the person who used to make sure this day was special is gone. Or they’re mourning the loss of their own childhood. Or the loss of the way things used to be, before their family fell apart. There’s no end to all the different forms and permutations of grief on days like this.
Most of the messages this week related to that passage from Julia Ward Howe I shared (which is a great one – read it here if you didn’t see it). But there were a few people asking why I didn’t name their loss in my mothers’ day message. This “what about me” also comes up when I mention the hierachy of grief, and almost any time I mention out of order death. What about divorce? What about strained relationships? What about the loss of self that happens in this life?
How come I don’t mention every possible loss?!?!?!?!?
Here’s the thing: I write mostly about death, especially out of order, traumatic, and accidental death. There are lots of other losses, yes. Rather than soften my language to write about “all losses” in a more generic way, I choose to stay quite specific. That means some people feel left out when they read my words. Some people even feel offended when their own particular loss isn’t named here.
As a culture, we don't really listen to loss. Grief becomes a competition for the scarce resource of love and support. There's never enough acknowledgment to go around. It's easy to feel slighted, unwelcome, and unrecognized. Click To TweetAs a culture, we don’t make space for loss. We don’t talk about grief. Not just grief related to death, but grief of any kind. That means that nearly every person is carrying a backlog of unexpressed, un-acknowledged pain. Like a dammed up river, unexpressed pain seeks – expression. Wherever it can. It’s what comes up, often yelling in outrage, when we don’t see our own losses stated and affirmed. It’s what happens when we hear someone else in pain, and we rush to say, “me too! I lost (insert person’s name) when I was young, so I know just how you feel.”
Grief becomes a competition for the scarce resource of love and support. There’s never enough acknowledgment to go around. It’s easy to feel slighted, unwelcome, and unrecognized.
It’s quite possible I will never name your loss specifically. There are simply too many losses, too many permutations of grief, for me to cover all of them. Whether your loss is named here or not, please know that you are welcome here.
When I talk about grief – when I talk about letting pain be there when pain is what is – I am talking about you. When I’m talking about finding kindness for yourself inside your pain, I am talking about you.
When I talk about our culture needing to get better at supporting people in pain, I’m talking about ALL pain, not just grief due to death.
My language is primarily death-language, because that is what I choose to speak. Because unusual and atypical deaths are even more silent, even more ignored forms of grief and loss in our already grief-averse culture. And because that is my own story: I write what I needed to hear, back when my own world exploded.
If you don’t see yourself here, please put on your translator ears as you read my words: imagine I am speaking to you.
Because the truth is, I am. No matter what words I use.
There is more than enough love here to go around.
How about you? Do you carry losses that not many people recognize? How do you make death-focused words fit the shape of your loss? Let us know in the comments.
Every year, September 11th comes around and people weep and cry openly for the loss of people they may or may not have met. Well, on September 13th, years before 9/11 happened, my 1.5 years younger hemophiliac brother died from the effects of AIDS. It is impossible for me to express how I feel about this loss – there was almost no chance he was going to live to a ripe old age, anyway. But he was my brother, and I miss him every single day. I miss him most especially right around the anniversary of his death. And when someone says, Well, you knew that was going to happen but those people in the Towers….it seems very unfeeling and makes me angry.
Wow. What an incredibly unfeeling comment that is to make to you. As though knowing makes one bit of difference. Humans can be so weird.
I don’t understand people who try to rate suffering. Sort of measuring it on a scale of 1 to 10. As though your suffering is a 6, you knew your brother had a fatal illness, compared to people who lost someone in the twin towers whose pain must be a 10 because it was unexpected. It just tells me they have never lost anyone they loved deeply. If they had, they would understand that the pain of losing a loved one is just as gut wrenching whether death comes after a long illness or suddenly from a heart attack or accident. They have my sympathy because some day they will find out the truth of it.
You voiced exactly what I was thinking. Or because someone who passed may have been an age that is expected, then it was ok and that person should be able to take the death easier. Grief is grief, and it hurts, no matter what, when, how, or where our loved one died. We grieve because we love, and love is not a contest.
My grief was unnamed for many years. My beautiful mother, slowly became wheelchair bound, then bedridden from MS in my teenage years and early twenties. By the time I had three children, under the age of four, my mom was entering a nursing home at the ripe old age of 55.
When I saw friends who were blessed to be in the company of their able bodied mothers at lunches, the park, shopping or simply in their homes having a visit, I experienced a longing and homesick feeling; a deep well of sadness I could not name.
Only in hindsight did I realize that I grieved that my loving mom could not accompany me and my children on any simple outing or even enter my home without enormous physical & medical support; that our family broke apart in spectacular fashion when her body failed her and our father could no longer endure the emotional grief that swallowed us whole.
I am now 60 years of age and my mother deceased over 10 years. Only in recent years have I realized I lived a lifetime of grief for the loving mom & family I had in my youth. While mom was the one who lost so much more than all of us, none of us escaped the collateral damage from the loss of our mom’s life as we knew it and our family bond.
Many of your words on death and dying find recognition in my soul. Losses come in many forms.
I really felt your words here, even tho i think im reading them years after you wrote them. I am dealing with the loss of my brother seven weeks ago, even taking megans class and i struggle with feeling that im taking this too far feeling too much indulging something dramatic or entitled and i really need to just wrap this up. Nobody is saying crappy things to me, im just doing it myself, thinking his partner has it worse, misses him more, or my mother, who lost her son, or my sister b/c they were so much closer. The reasons are endless and the final measage is the same: i dont get to feel this. Not all the way and not for as long as it takes. Why not? Is it our Protestant ethic that says feelings are self indulgent?
I’m so glad to have found your website today, and you’re so right about what you’re saying: loss is loss. In one recent year, I lost my mom (who was also my best friend), her husband, their home, estate, my job due to layoff and then the family all fell apart. I’m still shaking – personally, emotionally, financially – and alone in this community with no grief resources except for the internet and thank God for that! Even churches here are unsympathetic – or deaf – to the needs of the grieving. On Mother’s Day, I opted out from Sunday services when I heard that the topic was, “Lessons From My Mom.” I just couldn’t take the heartache.
My mother suffered a massive stroke on New Year’s Day. She was my best friend. She is still here, but she is gone. So many people tell me she will come back, but I know she won’t. My Father also suffered a massive stroke, 14 years ago. She was his caregiver. Now my sister and I must care for them both. The man who was my dad died that day all those years ago. Now we have lost them both. Mother’s Day was hard, but every day is hard. I miss her. I want her back. I am sad and angry, but I also must see to her care, and his care. I know this is what the rest of my life will look like, but I don’t mind. I see it as my responsibility. People say, “God just wasn’t done with them yet.” This makes no sense to me. There are some fates worse than death.
I lost my brother in 2002 to a very painful death. I was with him and I didn’t think I’d ever get over it. In 2005 my daughter in-law died. I called my husband weeping and said. This is it. This is something I’ll never get over. My heart broke in two for her and my son. In January of 2006 my mother died. I was with her, and won’t go into detail, but it so very painful. Than 6 months later my father broken hearted over my mother decided not to eat or drink anymore. This is NOT something I believe in and fought it. Nevertheless, he died within two weeks. All of these were devastating, horribly painful deaths that are still with me. BUT, in 2014 I lost my son, my son who had already endured so much grief himself. Yes, every death is painful and we’ll never completely get over them. And this is not taking away from the pain that those who have lost loved ones feel, but to lose a child is beyond anything else I’ve ever experienced. There are no words to describe what goes on inside our souls. It’s a little over 1 1/2 years since I lost my son, but unlike the other deaths, when it hits me (still many times a day) it’s as if he just died. There is no getting over this, or getting beyond, or finding peace in what happened. I believe God saved me many times from the ravages of this horrific thing, but still in this human form, this is a life long battle as I try to keep busy enough, concentrate on other things long enough, in order to gain moments free from the worst thing that can ever happen to a human being.
Today is the one year anniversary of the death of my son. He was my second born, my most needy and my soul child. He died from a massive cerebral hemorrhage due to a arterial venous malformation. I found him. He was only 35. He had many close calls in his life. Spinal meningitis at 2 months
I almost lost him many times. He had been in trouble in his teenage years and had addiction issues. When he passed, he was turning his life around.
He was my life’s work. This is the most God awful event that could ever be.
I lost my son in 2004, then 11 months later I lost my mother, I recently lost my brother almost 2 years ago. I was so very close to all three of them. But I feel there is nothing that compares to the loss of a child. I just had my best friend tell me that all loss is bad and that it feels just as bad to lose a father-in-law or a mother etc. I totally disagree. Yes grief is grief and it is not a contest, But to equate other friends and family to a child is not accurate in my mind. I would not wish this on her but I wish she had more understanding, sometimes I think people are like this because they have a deep fear of losing their own children. I forgave her for her shallow comments but it hurts nonetheless. Grief in any form really stinks for anyone.
I have lost 3/4 of my family and I am barely 50. Most of their deaths were tragic. I was able to say good-bye and say I Love You to two of them before they passed. The rest of the family I was not and there is a huge hole in
my being. I am slowly learning to live with this but I barely speak of it two others; I cannot hand their lack of empathy or understanding. Thank you Megan for being an authentic voice about death and grief. Your work is very much appreciated. You often give a voice to what I cannot speak.
Oh, yes … Loss is loss, just like pain is pain. It is true that most grief and loss accounts focus on loss through death … That is the most visible, evident form of loss, the one that we all will endure. There are losses that are “invisible”, just as there are injuries and illness that are not evident to the eye. Every visible loss has ripple effects — losses that stem from one central loss. I’m thinking of one of my own — my Mama died last year … She was not my biological mother, but she was the woman who took me under her wing when I was five, and gave me all that my mother could not. The loss of my Mama closed forever the book of my parental generation.
The effects, feelings, and aftermaths are universal no matter what the loss is. In my own life there have been so many deaths now that I’ve lost count; there have been losses through relational rupture, injury and disability, relocation, changes through aging (I am nearly 60) … It is a constant struggle to notice and give thanks for what remains, and to acknowledge that we are all continuing to function in the face of the grief that we carry. This is where a presence like yours, Megan, is such a gift. Thank you for what you offer.
I lost my husband of 32 years to what was eventually discovered at autopsy as glioblastoma. He had no symptoms whatsoever. I spoke to him at midnight 3/19/2018 and he said he loved me. I went to bed, woke up at 7:30 the next morning and found him in his office. He died about 3:30 am. This Mother’s Day left me in terrible shape and I’m still reeling. He always made Mother’s Day special and I was unprepared for the hit. I’m 12 weeks out and the struggle is getting worse. I’m sure it’s temporary – and this site is helping to find comfort in that knowledge. Grief sucks and it’s going to for the remainder of my days.
I lost my husband recently as well. We had been together 34 years, he was diagnosed last year with cancer. The battle was terrible, now I look back and see so clearly, that he has some symptoms several months sooner. My heart is broken, my mind is tired, and my spirit is struggling to NOT lose myself. Grief is tough, I could not imagine your pain. At least the last year, I was able to understand my fate and try to prepare my family and myself!
Having a place to express grief and not feel your heaviness and sorrow is placed on someone else has been a battle all in its own. I’m still in shock from the recent funeral of my Grandmother who also raised me a majority of my life, she lived a full and blessed life and even though we knew it was coming during her hospice care, we as a family who had held seven funerals in ten years just knew we’d lost a major part of what kept our family glued together. Loss of a son, a sister, a brother, a mother and father and both grandparents one after another. My healing has came through faith and prayers, and some days are an emotional roller coaster. Seeing these comments has been a blessing because sometimes it seems nobody understands and the pain just settles so deep in the midst of trying to understand their loss yourself. It’s a day to day basis of finding healing and reminding yourself that if they’re there watching over us, we mustn’t live in sorrow and grief but we must endure it and nurture it back into the love that connects us all. Thank you Jesus!
So glad to have found this site. My only child, Kaitlyn, died November 2, 2018 and I can barely function. Still have to go to work and try to put on a happy face when I feel like there is just nothing left. My life revolved around her. Today would have been her first day of 4th grade. Thank you so much for way of saying how grief really is. No one seems to understand why days like this are so hard, EVERY DAY actually is hard. The tears and anger are just at the surface every second. I have your book and have started reading it. Thank you so much.
I’m 58 years old and the hardest part for me is that as I get older, the losses continue to pile up. Before I can process someone’s death, the next person dies. Not to mention all the other “non-death” losses that people have mentioned above. It is hard and I actually feel, at times, like I have PTSD.