Well. It’s the end of April, and as always at this time of year, my thoughts are with my mom. But instead of talking more about her, I’d like to talk about how our society deals with the issues of dying, death, and grief.
I was in college when my mom was diagnosed with an aggressive strain of breast cancer and later given a terminal diagnosis (meaning this cancer was going to kill her). I was struggling with what was going on, and most of my peers couldn’t really relate to my problems, so I decided I wanted to join a support group. I was on a college campus, so how hard could it be to find one?
There was no support group on campus. There was no support group in the Santa Cruz area. I found a grief support group at a local hospital, but I was only allowed to begin attending once my mom had died. No support was deemed necessary for dealing with the traumas associated with watching someone die slowly, apparently.
Eventually I gave up. I didn’t have a counselor on campus to talk to. I didn’t receive any support. About five months after my mom died, my voice teacher, who was as close to a mentor as I had in college, was berating me for not having it together as much as a fellow student whose mom had also died. As you might imagine, this didn’t exactly do wonders for my morale. Grieving, I learned then, was not acceptable, even though I was functional and doing all the basic things I needed to be doing (going to class, completing my assignments, feeding myself, etc.).
This is all bullshit. When people have loved ones diagnosed with terminal illnesses, they need support during the time before death. That time is just incredibly wretched. Bad news streamed into my life in a steady torrent, and watching my mom suffer while I was completely helpless to do anything about it squeezed my heart in an unforgiving grip. The uncertainty of when hung over everything else, a promise of future misery.
Grief doesn’t have a timeline. Grief doesn’t disappear overnight, or in a month, or in five months, or in years. And grief affects people differently. When someone is dealing with something like this, processes to get support should be made simple, not complex and unclear and obviously involving much jumping through hoops. Instead people have unrealistic expectations and they simply don’t want to talk about it.
Grief takes the time it takes. Sometimes it crashes into your life and all you can do is try to hold on. Other times it creeps in stealthily, quietly, and you wonder what’s wrong with you and why you don’t feel more than you do. Years may pass and suddenly it jumps out at you when you least expect it. And it gets mixed in with all sorts of emotional experiences: fear, anger, relief, shock, numbness, hysteria, throwing yourself into your work, the ache of emptiness, recklessness, hopelessness, a gnawing sensation of searching for something.
There is no way to sugarcoat the truth. Having a loved one diagnosed with a terminal illness really sucks. Losing someone you love really sucks. Being reminded of your own mortality really sucks. And dealing with our society’s stupidity about these things makes it suck even more. After all, everyone dies at some point–why does it have to be a subject shrouded in silence?
And this doesn’t even get into the way our society treats those who are seriously ill and/or dying. Luckily we have people like Jay Lake documenting both the ways our society gets it wrong, and his experiences dealing with cancer.
We can do better.
The Practical Free Spirit 
Firstly, I’m sorry to hear about your Mum. That’s a horrid thing to have to deal with, but secondly, for what its worth, I always admire the straightforward way to approach any topic. It’s refreshing
Thanks. I really appreciate having a place to write straightforward essays like this one. 🙂
Thank you. I was in the same boat (just after college, with my dad), and it’s amazingly tough, and everyone deals with it differently. I’m glad you’re about to better put into words what I’ve felt for a long time.
I suspect it can be even tougher to navigate when younger because less of your peer group has any direct experience with death of nuclear family members at that point. But of course it’s difficult at any age.
Oh Amy! Sorry to hear it. I think that the work offered by hospice goes a long way in helping this. I have a close friend whose Mom just passed away, and the last 2-3 months hospice was around helping, and a great part of the work was helping him and his sister deal with the inevitable loss. I really admire their work.
But you are right – we don’t like death because, well, it is death. And we especially shun the grieving because, well because they have somehow been touched by death and are now probably “contaminated”.
I seriously think that is the root of it – not too long ago dying of a disease led to fears to contagion.
Surely we can move the clock forward just a bit, from say the Middle Ages to perhaps the 50s? (not asking all the way to the 21st century).
Anyway – huge hugs to you! (Alex says ‘hi’)
I’m very grateful hospice exists. A lot of the work around grieving and coping with the stress of these situations is because of them.
And yeah, I understand the discomfort with death. I also think we are ill equipped by our society to deal gracefully with discomfort, which definitely makes things harder in general for us.
Tell Alex hi for me! I had so much fun chatting with him. 🙂
I think society’s issues with grieving stem from multiple sources:
1) Most people are terrified of death and their own mortality. Anyone grieving reminds them of something they desperately want to forget and avoid.
2) As you noted, different people grieve different ways for different amounts of time. Grief is so varied that most of us don’t know how to deal with it because even when we have some frame of reference from personal experience, often that experience still isn’t relevant.
3) The people who can relate best to what you’re going through are usually the last people you want to turn to for support. I was fortunately able to cope with my mother’s death pretty well and did not need much support. But if I had needed support the person I would have most wanted to turn to for support was my best friend – both because she is my best friend but also because she knows what it is like to lose a parent.
Except that is also exactly why I wouldn’t want to turn to her for support: I know how incredibly difficult her grieving process was for years afterwards. Asking for her support with my grieving would likely have reopened her own emotional wounds.
“I was functional and doing all the basic things I needed to be doing (going to class, completing my assignments, feeding myself, etc.).”
Society has this really narrow and I believe inaccurate view like this on so many things. Lost a parent but functional? Your grief can’t be too bad. Drinking problem but functional? You can’t be an alcoholic. Feel down all the time but functional? You can’t have depression.
Thanks for laying those points out so clearly. Grief is tough; it doesn’t fall into black and white categories and so is harder to understand and cope with.
Just as everyone differs in their experiences of grief, I think what kind of support someone can offer differs as well. After I’d processed through the initial grief of losing my mom, I had a strong desire to be able to help others going through similar experiences. Occasionally I’ve found that sort of thing to be triggering but usually I find it very fulfilling to be able to offer support to people around these issues, perhaps even more so because I didn’t receive as much support as I needed personally. But this will vary from person to person, I think.
And your last point is so dead on. It’s so easy to minimize a person’s problems if they seem to be doing basically okay.
You are so right, Amy. My sister (my only sibling) died in 1995 at age 35 of non-Hodgkin’s Lymphoma. We didn’t love each other, but we were closely connected in so many ways, and having her wrenched out of my life was incredibly difficult, and still is. Many people think grief only occurs if you lose someone you love, but that’s not true at all. And beyond grief, my hypochondria really amped up when she died. My doctor was willing to prescribe drugs, but didn’t even really urge me to get counselling, let alone require it. Eighteen years later, her death is still something that gnaws at me. But society seems to view grief as a 21st century rich person’s luxury, or else a shameful weakness.
Whereas I view grief as a necessary emotional experience to have in order to process feelings and deal with the realities of being mortal and self aware beings.
It’s really tough when someone with whom you had a complicated relationship dies, because then not only are you dealing with shock and grief, but you also have to sort through the ambiguities of the relationship and attempt to come to some sort of resolution about it, even though you can no longer enter into dialogue with the other person.
I’m sorry to hear about your sister, and I’m sorry your doctor wasn’t more helpful.
Sometimes I’m convinced death denial is core to the American psyche. Dealing with illness or age or grief isn’t something we do in public. We hide the old in their own “communities”, medicalize our grief and life, and pressure those who aren’t conforming to our expectations of living. The isolation we create as a society is probably much worse than what people are actually going through. We should be helping people live those parts of their life. We can do better.
I agree one hundred percent. Isolation has pretty much always made any hard experiences I was going through a lot more difficult. It seems like many of the times when we most need extra support are when we are instead encouraged to put up a good front and discouraged from talking about what’s going on and getting the support we need.
A wonderful and brave essay which I can identify with as I lost my father suddenly in my first year of university. I had also lost a brother in an accident just two years before. I was physically ill with grief but went through the motions of taking my exams during the time and didn’t tell any of my profs…there might have been some help at the school but i was too shy to seek it out. I had a very good friend to talk to though, someone very different from me, a smart and rather wild type but kind. I think he was a rough bad boy angel. Just having that friend helped me deal with it all, just as well as I could.
Later, within the year i made a mistake and married the “wrong guy” ( someone else!) just because I wanted some happy changes to my grief. I should have waited for some time to heal….but….I have a wonderful son…now an adult, He is my angel now.
I wonder.
[…] We Need to do Better when Dealing with Death […]
I found your blog through a friend of a friend on facebook and I find that I have to comment on this post. Thank you so much for talking about this topic. When I lost my grandmother (a woman who was like a second mother to me) two people who I thought would be the most supportive of me decided after a month that I should be “done” grieving and that maybe I should see a psychiatrist because I was taking it far too hard. I have since cut those people out of my life, but I couldn’t believe the insensitivity. I had thought it was because neither of them had lost anyone they were close to before, but one of these people just recently watched her father go through the often messy and uncomfortable to think about aspects of cancer. Her attitude was the same.
I think part of the problem is our society’s discomfort with death and unhappy emotions. If it’s messy or can’t be represented in a sitcom we don’t want to see it. Hurry up and cover it up!
Anyway, thank you for expressing all of this so bluntly. Reading your words eased a little ache I didn’t know I was carrying around with me.