Good Mourning
November 12, 2015
A friend of mine asked me why I hadn’t ever written a column about grief. I couldn’t help but answer, “Because it’s not funny.” Not that what I write is necessarily funny. But grief is the least likely to be funny.
Then I remembered I’d written a whole play—a whole funny play—about grief, in response to the loss of one of my close friends who simply dropped dead one day. She was a young mother whose kids were 3 and 5 at the time.
I’ll never forget that call, from another friend who asked if I was sitting down. My daughter was 6-weeks-old at the time, so I told him, “Of course I’m sitting down: It’s all I do.” Then he told me the news.
I couldn’t think straight. But I needed to get it together; I had to get my daughter to one of her many newborn doctor appointments. And that’s when I literally took my car door off. I was so dazed, I had left it open after I put the baby in the car seat. I pulled out of our carport—cue the loud, horrible noise. And the crying.
Grief. It makes you cry. And it can make you stupid.
The grief I felt when my friend died was deep and long-lasting. Perhaps it was the new-mother hormones or the sudden nature of her death. Maybe it was the fact that she was a contemporary and it made me feel the fleeting nature of life.
Or perhaps it was because of her friends, from all the parts of her life, who came together to find solace and meaning together.
I worried we were perpetuating the grieving by doing it together. Then again, doing it together gave us a reason not to drink alone. And boy did we drink. We drowned our grief in Cosmos and Chardonnay. Sure, I was still breastfeeding; but my daughter turned out fine.
It was the beginning of our grieving process, and we didn’t handle it all that well. We wavered between appropriate sadness and complete irreverence. It was all so surreal.
My friend Pam and I were tasked with finding an outfit to bury our friend in. We started going through her clothes and realized we had very different tastes from our dearly departed. So we picked the outfit we knew she would have loved, even if we didn’t. It was bright blue. When we were told no undergarments were necessary, we couldn’t stop laughing, thinking about how our friend would have hated going panty-less through all of eternity. So we put a pair of panties in the bag so my husband could bring it to the funeral home.
Eventually, we handled our grief by doing something. We started a charity that raised over $100,000 to build a room at Children’s National Medical Center in Washington, D.C., dedicated to her memory.
My husband, who was also her friend, dealt with his grief by planning the funeral. He’s a great party planner, and isn’t a funeral a celebration of life? Or at least that’s what they say. Trust me, if you want to truly celebrate life, you should have my husband plan your funeral. He’ll organize the speakers and ensure everyone speaks briefly and beautifully. And he’ll make sure there’s plenty of food for the mourners.
He’ll also give you an awesome eulogy. Before my girlfriend died, we’d lost my husband’s college roommate, who left behind a young wife and 17-month-old son. My husband delivered eulogies at each of our young friends’ funerals. We used to joke that he had a new core competency and we were going to hire him out to do eulogies because he was remarkably good at them. We also joked that maybe you didn’t want to get too close to him, because, well, it was looking like if you did, you probably weren’t going to make it to 40.
Early in our marriage, we had far too many occasions to deal with grief. Before we lost our young friends, my mother-in-law died of cancer, just a year after we got married. As a young wife who had never experienced grief of this magnitude, I was ridiculously unprepared to help my groom. So I did what I knew how to do best: I hugged him a lot. And I outsourced, suggesting he go to a therapist. Thirty years later, I now know I was mostly just frightened by his grief and unable to deal with my own.
But we learned that grieving isn’t always about hand-wringing and crying. I actually remember laughing so hard as we shared stories about her with the family. But often the laughter would turn into a torrent of tears that was always hugely cathartic.
The loss of a parent is truly profound and, I believe, an existential experience. It’s the loss of the person who knows you best, the person who made your very existence possible.
The loss of a contemporary brings grief of a different kind. It’s the life that could have been. The person who never got to finish what he or she started. It makes you instantly question your place in the world, forcing you to take stock of your life and purpose.
And then there is, to me, the ultimate grief. One I cannot imagine and hope I never have to know: the loss of a child. I only know from those who have that you actually do, somehow, end up living through it.
It was 12 years ago when my own father died suddenly after falling off a ladder. I found myself shaken to the core by his passing, both for who he was to me and for how he died. I found myself unable to sleep, anxious, and, ultimately, so very, very sad.
When I called my therapist for counsel, he said, “Well, that’s very sad, Pam. You know, you are supposed to be sad.” And it was perhaps the most profound thing he said to me during our many years working out my kinks together. He gave me permission to be sad.
Dr. JoAnne Pedro-Carroll, a renowned Rochester clinical psychologist who recently lost her own granddaughter to cancer, says, “Grief is a universal experience that touches us all. There is no ‘right’ way to deal with the loss of a loved one.”
But no matter how we do it, she says it’s important “to give ourselves permission to feel, remember and, yes, even laugh about memories shared with our loved one.”
It might take a long time, but she says, eventually, “their memory becomes a treasure.”
And isn’t that the point? It’s not that time heals. It’s just the continuum of our grief. To this day, 30 years after my mother-in-law’s passing, my husband is sad at family milestones because his mother isn’t there. What I know now is that it doesn’t diminish the celebrations but makes them all the richer for remembering those we loved and how much we still love them and want them to be with us.
The day we buried my friend, I brought my breast pump and its cigarette lighter attachment for the car so I could pump on the way to the gravesite. When I told that story to another friend who is a playwright, she said, “That sounds like a scene from a play.”
And so we set about writing it. It became my way to muscle through my grief. It gave me a gift of organizing my thinking and feelings about my friend, and it left me with a legacy of the greatest creative collaborations of my theatrical career.
My co-playwright, Caleen Sinette Jennings, was an award-winning playwright and professor at American University. While writing the play, she introduced me to the work of Gabriele Rico, whose book Pain and Possibilities looks at the neuroscience of writing and creativity and is a primer on how to write through loss. It helped me not only write the play but also deal with my feelings.
I always imagined I would thank her one day for the inspiration her book brought me. But as I was writing this column, I learned she died in 2013. Her obituary talks about her life, her work and her family. I started to cry, feeling sad for her and for never sharing with her how she helped me.
But through my tears I saw this quote of hers, and I was left with gratitude for all those I’ve loved and lost, because I believe it’s through grieving that we can truly know the joy of life.
"If you face your griefs and your losses and your negatives, you can take your life in little steps, one at a time. You won't be caught by unmanageable crises. It's not a matter of what hurts us in life, it's how we deal with what hurts us that matters."
First Published in the Democrat and Chronicle and USA Today Network.