Grief: a compassionate response

On April 6, 2014, a Sunday morning, my husband of nearly 27 years died of cancer. He was 58. It has been eight years and I miss him every day, but I am no longer the basket case I was for the first few years after he died. I still cry sometimes, but not the buckets of tears right after he died. I am doing well slowly finding a way to live a life with purpose without him. 

When I think about those first years, I can look back and see so many times when people were loving and kind and other times when people often without intending to said or did things that made the grief worse. 

Really, I don't think anyone understands the grief journey until they have been through it. I certainly didn't. Here is my list of things that helped me and things that hurt. 

Bible verses and pithy sayings like "he's in a better place" are worthless. 

Silence and hugs are better than any words.

Fights over the things the loved one left behind make the pain of loss even worse. 

Never ever ask "aren't you over it yet?" or "wasn't that years ago."

Losing Michael was the watershed event of my life. I measure time from the day he died. Over time I became more functional but I will never be over it.  

One of the kindest things anyone did was the social worker at the hospital asked me how did Michael and I meet and then she let me talk about him while tears filled her eyes. 

Once I called a friend up to tell her I couldn't stop crying. She said, "I'll be right over." She came and sat with me while I cried. 

Death makes people uncomfortable. The raw intense emotions loss produces makes people uncomfortable. Those emotions are a natural response to a traumatic event.  Often times, I think people offer bumper sticker solutions so they don't have to think about their own death or the death of the people they love. They just want to say something meaningless and move on. 

The compassionate thing to do is to enter into another person pain and not try to fix it with shallow sayings. Just be there for them. 

Have you experienced grief and loss? What were the things that helped and what hurt? Have you walked with a friend or a family member through this journey? What did you learn? 

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