Lessons Learned from Grief, Pt. 1

Part 1 (Grief Sucks) — Part 2 (No More Goonies)

A lot has happened in the last year. So hopefully I’ve learned a lot from it. So without further ado, I present: Lessons Learned from Grief—Volume I, written by a 25-year-old person who had to check off “widowed”on his tax return for the first time.

• Grief sucks. At the end of the day, grief is just the natural response to things that are totally unnatural. We only know life. The only thing we have experienced is life. Everything we know to be good are things that contribute to our ability to live. We even believe in a God called the “Living God.” So death is the opposite of everything we know, experience, consider good, and that we believe in. It’s not supposed to make sense. And the emotional response to it will never make much sense either. Which makes it even less fun.
• Dogs can be so much more comforting than people when you lose your special someone. At moments when you feel the most lonely or the least able to share your feelings with other human beings, dogs are there for you…

• Except when they’re not. I can hardly count the number of times I went from bawling at a sad movie on my couch to yelling at my dog for suffocating me as she tried to lick the salty tears off my face. Like, c’mon dog, read the room.

• Age is extremely relative, however. Seriously, I dare you to find a “young widow(er)” group where at least half the people are younger than 45-years-old. In their defense, “young widow group” does sound better than “middle-aged widow group.” But still, it’s a little rough going into a group as a 25-year-old and seeing people in their 50’s complain about only getting to spend, I don’t know, 30 years with their significant other or only getting to see their kids graduate high school instead of college too. I mean, I understand… it is still sad and all… but if they’re “young” widows what on earth does that make me!? Some kinda weird infant widower?
• The best advice for handling grief can come from unexpected places—fortune cookies, the inside of Dove chocolate wrappers, your 6-year-old niece. Similarly…
• People who should know better can give the worst advice. For example, the man in his 50’s who has lost plenty of people in his family, his circle of friends, and who lost even his own child… and yet who still thought the words I needed to hear just a few weeks after losing my wife were, “You’re young. You’ll find someone else. There’s plenty of pretty fish in the sea.” He said as he gestured towards a crowd of high school girls…

• Grief decisions are probably the worst kind of decisions. Por ejemplo: buying a plane ticket to Mexico that leaves the next day to avoid depression. Those decisions might make for some interesting stories, but they definitely won’t help you accomplish your greater purpose in life, nor will it teach you anything you don’t already know about how to cope with life. Instead you just wind up feeling more irresponsible than before.

• The dead-spouse card lets you get away with a lot of poor choices. Seriously, let’s test your reaction… Should you tell your grieving friend not to go hiking alone in the mountains of a foreign country for an entire day with no clear plan of how to get back? You probably should… but then again,  “who are you to say what he needs right now?” People seem to do some hard-core mental-gymnastics to justify my bad grief-decisions for me.
• You will feel like a black cloud to people who are not grieving. It can feel pretty obvious when people aren’t sure how to talk to someone they expect to be depressed/sad/grieving.
• You will also feel like a ray of sunshine to people who are grieving. At first, you might expect that hanging out with someone also coping with losing their beloved would be triggering. You might expect it to be unbelievably depressing. It’s surprisingly not. Instead you’ll find that talking to people who lost their special person leads to giggling over the weird quirks of having a deceased-person as the love of your life ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

Hope these little nuggets of knowledge help someone else grieving. And if they only help you to laugh and then to feel bad about laughing, I hope you can pass it on to someone who it might help.