Sometimes we are called to just listen -
and not to relate it back to ourselves -
I heard the therapist and author, David Kessler say this today, in a conversation with Dr. Gabor Mate (one of my favorites and an expert on trauma, himself a Holocaust survivor as an infant) -
“Grief is any unwanted change.”
Applying a definition like this, opens space for all different types of losses.
We tend to think of grief as just when someone dies, but grief can also be -
A relationship that ended.
A betrayal.
A miscarriage - which can be thought of as a death, or not, depending on your views of the stages of a developing fetus.
It can constitute a mourning of a life that you don’t have, that you thought that you would.
It’s a loss of some kind.
Many of us will [have to know] grief in this world.
Sometimes experiences of loss, death, and grief are traumatic; sometimes they are not.
Grief is painful. It changes your world. It shifts you.
Trauma overwhelms your nervous system and you get stuck.
A lot of times unexpected deaths or tragic ones, are not only grief but they are also traumatic.
I try to hold space for all kinds of losses and grief, with others, because I know the pain of many different kinds of losses.
And I try to imagine the differences between the losses that I can never conceive of - because I haven’t lived through them - the death of a spouse, that of a child, a suicide of either one of those - which constitute a different and more amplified type of loss and grief and shock and trauma -
A battle with cancer - a grief and loss of a life, that perhaps, you thought you would have, but perhaps some surgery or chronic condition has changed the trajectory of life for you.
There are so many different types of losses and it’s hard to cap them or encapsulate all of them.
The infinite possibilities.
But I want to acknowledge them all that I don’t know or have experiences with.
I’ve written about it before - but I truly believe the key to compassion it to be able to hold space both for the similarities of pain and loss and solidarity with another in their human experience of heartache and loss -
While simultaneously holding equal amounts of space for curiosity and ability for differences to exist.
Ie - how is your experience different?
How is it dissimilar from my own?
In what way(s) can I not or should not try to homogenize them/to make them the same and to dismiss your unique experiences?
Too many people too often dismiss the second part -
Because we’re not great at allowing for other people to speak on their own experiences without relating them back to our own.
This is why after my father died by suicide, I had an aquaintance’s parents who said to me -
“Well, we all go through it, our parents dying.”
I just sort of stared at her.
I didn’t say anything in response.
It was par for the course, that this person had to be in the know -
Even though, quite frankly, they didn’t know what the fuck they were talking about.
Yes, both of us had lost a parent. (In her case, her parents).
But she was 35 years my elder and my father just killed himself. Hers died in an accident, working.
We did not have the same experience.
But in likening them as the same and dismissing any differences, not being curious as to how a suicide might be different than an accident -
It requires less work on behalf of the part of the other.
And, as we discussed before, people don’t want to talk about suicide.
Some people also don’t want to admit that there are experiences that they do not know and possibly cannot understand, even though someone 35 years their junior can and does, because she’s living through them.
To put it succinctly, sometimes we would do better just to shut the fuck up and listen.
Even though we don’t know what to say.
Even though we feel deeply and incredibly uncomfortable.
Even though we have no relatable experiences.
Maybe, instead, we could think of this as an opportunity to demonstrate a kind, compassionate, ear. And to learn something. To share in a fellow human being’s experience and to reflect on it, on its own, in its own right.
I am baffled by these people, honestly.
And it’s not because I always say the right thing, or because I never awkward, but -
I also would never think it interject my stories of a relative who had a cancer and with what I know about that situation, in a conversation with someone who had a first hand experience with battling cancer.
I would never think I should take center stage, or have any room to speak in a conversation when someone spoke with losing a partner.
Or, losing a child.
This is my turn to shut up. And listen.
Even if/when it’s about suicide.
It’s not immediately all about me.
Yes, we share a similarity in suicide loss, but suicides are just as unique as they are different, in what happened, the methods, the way that it left someone reeling.
Because that person was also someone’s beloved, and they had a unique relationship to them, that person was special.
It can just be about them.
It doesn’t always have to be about you.
And that’s okay.
We are allowed to just be curious about what another’s experience is, and the differences between them.
We don’t have to add anything or offer anything.
As one of my favorite quotes says,
“When we honestly ask ourselves which person in our lives mean the most to us, we often find that it is those who, instead of giving advice, solutions, or cures, have chosen rather to share our pain and touch our wounds with warm and tender hand. The friend who can be silent with us in a moment of despair or confusion, who can stay with us in an hour of grief and bereavement, who can tolerate not knowing, not curing, not healing and face with us the reality of our powerlessnes, that is a friend who cares.”
~Henri Nouwen