I'm actually pinching my own title, as in the title of this is a subtitle in an article that's coming out tomorrow on Medium about the Hulu TV show, The Bear. I just dug it too much.
I didn't tell my best friend when my grandmother died. I just couldn't handle it. I'm not good with condolences. Which was a mite hard to explain when the truth did come out. Damn weird when someone asks about a relative and you have to say, you know, they've been dead for a while. It came as a shock. Not so much that she was gone, she was quite old and all, but that I hadn't said anything. That all those first fresh days of grief, I'd just gone through our relationship without a hint of it.
Before that, I wouldn't have thought of myself as someone who internalized. I mean, I'm not someone who likes talking about themselves. I rarely, if ever, go out with my friends and start complaining.
I'm a very "How are you? Fine" type.
And while I knew that, I didn't even know I could go to such an extent. Isn't death something you're supposed to process together? Something to rely on friends and family to help you cope with? I don't know. Maybe. I'm tempted to say everyone processes grief in their own way. For me, it was being normal with someone, cutting out the I'm sorry for your loss's and how you doing. I didn't want anyone to ask.
Another friend, one I was somewhat forced to inform by circumstance at the time handled it extraordinarily. She did none of the condolence dance. I don't know, there's something I perceive about that as very fake. So she was very subtle, she almost didn't even acknowledge what had happened. I remember being baffled at the time. Not understanding. This was not the familiar go-round.
Later, many months later, we were walking together, and we got to talking about grief, and about how that death, that absence impacted me and mine. My friend's trained as a psychologist, so I suppose that helps a lot. She was so attentive, so there, so warm and genuine. There was none of the fakeness I perceive in condolences. It was a genuine shared moment where being sad was okay.
The way I see it, often, we don't know how to react to death (perfect person to talk about that, right?), and when we offer condolences, I think we only rarely allow ourselves to feel the other person's grief. I think for the most part, it's just what you say, what you're supposed to say. And really just kinda wanting them to go back to how they were. In a way, I'm sorry is about you when you say it, not about the other person, and I don't like that, so why bother with it at all?
I don't know if any of this makes sense.
It's not to say your own condolences aren't valid. Rather, it's a freewrite observation that we each process grief in our way, and sometimes it can be nice to have someone who's normal about it. Because when you lose someone, I don't think you need someone else who doesn't know how to react and is weighing on the moment with their own awkwardness. You don't know how to react to that death, either. You're confused enough, without taking anyone else's confusion on your shoulders.
When my grandmother died, everyone was so solicitous, so there. And I was so hellbent on moving through that I didn't process it. I only processed it about 4 months later or so. It was the day after what would've been her 90th birthday, and I was at a show.
And it's your song that sets me free
I sing it while I feel, I can't hold on
I sing tonight cause it comforts me
I sang then, with a crowd of strangers. And I felt free.
I feel you in the wind
I never understood that line before, but now I do. I feel her, not always, just sometimes. See, I think when you die, you go back to the cosmos, and the universe, and all that surrounds us. I think something bigger than you survives. Even if maybe it doesn't remember who you were here on Earth.
And it feels like, since she died, I've been more attuned to that. It's good. I'm learning how to let grief be, without being crushing or sad, or depressing. I've discovered that,
Grief can come from a tremendous place of love inside you.
Which is why I embrace my own sadness, when it comes. Because it comes from love. It flows through love. Like everything.
