thoughts of a practical nature, not on grief itself, but on a statistically more-likely condition: grief-adjacency.

being with those who are grieving is hard. suck it up.

feel like you’re intruding, stumbling over words, unsure what to do? afraid you’re not strong or close enough, that you won’t, in some fundamental way, be up to the task? all that pales. you are not the point. just go.

do you fear confronting your own mortality? will the evidence of decline and loss and sorrow hit too close to home? will you find the personal and the universal joined in ways that are unsettling? yep. and yet (and because), you go.

you go to the hospital. go to the kitchen table. go to the sickroom. go to the church. go to the front porch and leave a note whose words fail to convey the enormity, the empathy, the terror, the insufficient, fumbling solace, but which are words you wrote in your own hand, that you taped to a plate of brownies, certain of nothing except that brownies are better than no brownies, and that words, no matter how thin, are better than silence.

how are we to stand in the face of existential futility? perhaps we can not, or maybe there is a point to all the tiny, feeble gestures here below: that the best that we can do or hope for or be lies within the habit of small kindnesses. i mean this in the immediacy of grief, as well as in the fullness of time, in life at all scales of consideration. i believe that small kindnesses are what we can consciously, repeatedly practice. that they are the union of integrity and empathy and action. that they quite often take on enormous significance, feeling infinitely greater to the recipient than the effort they require. that they may well be the sum total of what outlasts us.

some essential skills: accurate listening, empathetic and open. eye contact. embracing (not that half-hugging mixed with the qualification of back-patting, but real, body-to-body envelopment). hand-holding. sitting in silence. needlessness. suspension of whatever is outside, or other, or next.

prep: carry a clean handkerchief (or two), or a tissue (or ten). wash your hands, then wash your hands again. silence your phone. don’t wear white (dark colors are better at hiding smears of mascara and snot). you may well arrive flustered; smooth your face, empty your hands, and take some deep breaths before the last door.

good things to bring to sites of limbo and dread: a disposable cold bag with bottles of water and ginger ale. dark chocolate. trail mix. a book of poems (mary oliver never fails). a neck pillow. clementines. hand wipes. jelly beans. hand lotion. cashmere socks.a pack of  bandanas (so all-purpose: filter harsh light, soak up tears, wipe up spills, make-shift sleep mask). a coupon or certificate for food delivery (this can be an absolute god-send, especially for hospital-waiting, but requires checking into. ask the front desk about policy and particulars). anticipate the lack of flat surfaces and storage in such places, and the need for portability: pack your offering so it can hang from the back of a chair, or can slip into a handbag.

not: flowers, except a small clutch from your own garden (that hospital rooms can be ‘brightened’ by anything except people, but especially by a visibly decaying industrial product, is a pernicious falsehood). fruit in the form of a bouquet (not the time, not the place for the foisting of flagrant stupidity). wheat grass, or other potions (beware the instinct to ‘make things better’; such does not exist). anything that has to be returned or kept up with. articles or counsel of unshared faith (if you haven’t worshiped together or had specific conversations about spirituality, then no matter how well-intended, check your evangelism at the door). children: neither their immune systems nor their concepts of mortality are sufficiently robust.

in the houses of grief: bring soup, soup, and more soup. a big pot of it is good; frozen single (or family) size containers are good. soup is just good, as are cookies and casseroles. these are times for comfort foods and carbs, for ziploc and tupperware.

open your eyes and shut your mouth; noticing is power and doing trumps all. the lawn needs mowing; the socks need mating; the dishes or the car or the kids need washing. pitch in of your own volition. do what needs to be done; when done, mention it lightly, so as not to add to the list of things that make one think they’re crazy.

set yourself calendar reminders for two weeks, three months, and one year later. make a point of being in touch, face-to-face or voice-to-voice, on each of those dates.

in this previous post about the grief club, i mention some things to say or not say. i won’t repeat them, but will elaborate just a bit: at their core, the grieving don’t know (can’t know) how they are. their disorientation is so complete that they have not only have no idea what is next, but lack any concept that anything will be, or can be. too often, inquiries along these lines are veiled seekings-of-assurance.  we so deeply want them not to hurt. we desire on their behalf, if not ‘okay’ or ‘better’, then at least ‘something’. this desire, this fumbling toward understanding, this prejudice for progression,  comes at them from every direction. the gift of not needing to know is a great one. ‘regardless of how you are, without need to press, comfortable with you and your silence, i am here.’ this is a great message.

when someone has died, the displacement is profound; those closest  need anchors, tangible reassurances of a time when they existed. go through your old pictures and find some to give to the near ones and dear ones. write down fond memories and tuck in an envelope to be shared with them a few weeks later.

here is a failsafe, an ace to tuck up your sleeve. it’s a commonplace question that allows much or little to be revealed, is never too forward, shows empathy, opens doors, and reveals a basic understanding of the core disruption. when you don’t know what else there is to say, try: ‘how are you sleeping?’

i know i’m old-fashioned (and regular readers, you know it, too), but i find social media too feeble a format for feelings this jagged. grief at its nearest and harshest seems to shred up the facebooks. it took me seven years to post about my late partner, even in this relatively snug blogway. that’s how much time i needed for those feelings to fit within this frame. that, however, is just me. find comfort where you can, for it is fleeting. never, though, post about the grief of others, except (as i’ve done here) in ways that abstract your experience, or disguise its sources. even then, think longer and harder than usual before you click.

here’s one slim anecdote that for me sums up all the rest: seven years ago, about a month after joe died, two of my nearest and dearest, a couple, asked if i wanted to travel with them on a trip they had planned to paris. they did not offer to pay for my travel or lodging, they promised nothing but their company. to them, it was a small thing. but i knew two things they did not: that joe’s birthday fell within the week they proposed, and that paris was one of his favorite cities. i said yes, booked the flight, and carried along a small portion of joe’s ashes. on his birthday, in the le jardin des plantes (a garden he’d known and loved well), beneath a battered old pine, while the gardeners took their lunch break, i dug a small hole, and left buried there a part of him and of me.

i’ve talked about moving through, not around it; about grief as a muscle we must exercise, or else we atrophy. it can be hard to conceive of what this means in concrete terms. yet one thing is clear: that we don’t do it alone. my friends love me. i love joe. joe loved this garden. my friends extended themselves, put themselves adjacent to my grief. and so one small, kind thing becomes a web, stretching from here to there, from now to then.

and so it was that slowly, never surely, my heart came back to life, one kindness at a time.

 

(all the words and images are mine. kindly use kindly.)