Who [gets to] calls themselves a grief expert

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash

Lately I’ve been fascinated by those who consider themselves to be grief experts, the self-appointed title, that is. Not the ones who have grief counseling or grief studies training.

Now—I value lived, embodied experiences.

But, I realize that, if I do—

Then, fuck, I am also a grief expert.

I sometimes forget, but then I see the posts on social media—

The ones where they say that usually by age 50 you’ve lost someone, by 60, usually at least one parent.

Wow.

I contrast that how my entire family was gone by the time I was 36. I had lost two babies and then my narcissistic ex—the one I had made my family with, abandoned our relationship in an affair made worse by denial and the lack of accountability.

I am well acquainted with grief.

I think sometimes people think that I only advocate for suicide loss, but I also have the standard experience of beloved mother and grandmother passes too.

They weren’t quite so jarring, shocking and traumatic, but they were still grief—they still hurt.

I couldn’t mourn them properly, or my babies, because of the traumatic losses. I am only now embracing, embodying and feeling all the grief from those losses.

My maternal grandmother was an odd woman and abandoned her kiddos and so, obviously, the relationship was strained.

But, honestly, sometimes I forget that she also died within one year of my mother, my brother, my 2 children.

That whole year exists in a foggy state for me. I remembered even as it was happening, in March 2020, before the pandemic would shut the world down in a few weeks—I was in FL with my former partner and I felt like I was disembodied. I don’t know how to explain it other than it was a cold-medicine head feeling, like I was floating in a dream and unable to absorb the realities of what had happened and how my world had changed so dramatically, so suddenly.

And as I think about this, I consider my beloved Grandma Donelson.

My Grandma Donelson also knew grief. And though I thank God that my dad waited to off myself until after she died, I still reflect on her experiences:

My uncle died tragically in a car accident only a few weeks after returning safely from Vietnam. In the early 1970’s, I think 1972ish.

My grandmother, her husband, died in 79. And within that year, following, I believe both her father and mother passed as well. They were elderly and my great-grandpa, from what I understand was senile.

Still—a lot of loss all at once.

Complex grief.

I think about this differently now, the more I consider and reflect on the importances of intergenerational trauma, taking stock of the experiences that our ancestors had in shaping both our emotional inheritance as well as our DNA, in terms of epigenetics.

And that’s just my dad’s genetic offerings.

When I consider my mother’s—abandoned as a child, physical and verbal abuse and alcoholism from a stepfather, being torn away from her father and paternal grandfather, aunt’s suicide, financial stress and father’s alcoholism—

My family’s story—like so many others—is dizzying with the levels and layers of generational trauma and emotional wounds.

I know trauma. I know grief. I know emotional wounds and intergenerational wounds.

I am an expert of my own lived, embodied experiences.

I too am a grief expert and a trauma expert.

Photo by Sandy Millar on Unsplash