Trying to Fix Grief

I'm a "fixer;" I like to fix things.  Maybe that's one reason I'm finding the grief process to be so tough - because there's no righting this situation.

Not that I haven't tried.  I went through with three different counselors in search of a remedy not long after Dad went on ahead, each of whom didn't specifically deal with grief; I liked all of them at first precisely because they seemed to have a linear approach to how they laid out their sessions - my impression was that they were "fixers" too, and that seemed like a good thing to me at the time. 

About halfway through my second session with the first counselor, she asked me how I defined myself after the loss of my father.  What the hell does she want me to say? I thought, and I felt as if I had been sucker punched.  I felt like I was afloat in a sea of sadness on my best days during that time, and on many of the other days I felt like I was drowning.  How do I define myself???  I had absolutely no idea, and I knew it would be a long time before I could withstand even the thought of redefining myself without my dad here with me in this world. And so, without answering, I thanked her for her time and walked out the door.

Two sessions in with the second counselor, she leaned back in her chair, put each of her fingers together with each of the matching fingers on the opposite hand so that it looked like she was about to start doing the hand-gesture that goes along with "Itsy Bitsy Spider," and said, "I think what you need to do is to realize that you were lucky to have been given the time to say goodbye to your father."  Then she just sat there looking at me expectantly, as if she thought that some giant epiphany was going to come to me in that moment.  Anyone who has ever been through the death of a loved one after that person has had to suffer through a terminal illness would not find comfort in that statement, particularly at that point in the grief process.  Without a word, I stood up and walked out.

I waited a couple of weeks and then, mainly because I was concerned that I still wasn't sleeping much at all, I tried again.  About 45 minutes into the first session with Number 3, I got "It's already been six weeks since your loss.  You should ask your primary care physician to write you a prescription for an anti-depressant."  The message I took from that was that I should have already moved on, that six weeks was plenty of time to have moved through the grief, and that I should get over it, and that's really the last thing I wanted to hear.  Strike three.

Luckily, through a friend of a friend, I found my way to a grief counselor about six weeks after that, and that was a different ball game all together.  That made me realize the lack of training and knowledge in the area of grief that the other three had.  The grief counselor let me talk about my experience and my feelings; she had posters on the walls of her office that said things like, "To live in the hearts we leave behind is not to die" and, my favorite: "Every grief needs a thousand tellings."  

More than one physician, when I've gone in for a check-up or for a minor physical complaint and then when I've brought up the subject of my struggle to try to figure out how to cope with the loss of my father, has offered to prescribe medication as a solution for grief.   As society does so often these days, these doctors have seen grief as a sickness, as an imperfection, as something that needs to be "gotten over."  I didn't want to be on medicine.  I know it's something that's helpful or even necessary for some people, and I told myself that I wouldn't completely rule it out as an option for myself on down the road -  but I instinctively realized that to numb the feelings associated with the loss of such an important person in my life at that point would not only put the feelings associated with grief on hold temporarily but also would likely numb me to the goodness in my life, and I knew that the latter was all that was keeping me going.  As I had learned from my dad, I mustered all the courage I could and forged ahead, for the most part with the belief that someday, somehow I would find a way to make it through.  Because one thing that I've learned about grief is that not only is there not a "quick fix" for all the things that come along with it, but there isn't really a "fix" at all.      

Valuable Advice

Someone asked me recently what the best advice that I was given after my dad went on ahead was.  My answer involves words of wisdom that were imparted to me by three people:

The day after my dad died, one of my friends said, "Stay strong," which was a sentiment several others had also expressed to my family that day and during my dad's illness, but this friend added two more words that gave a whole new meaning: "... or don't."  I'm not sure that I fully grasped the meaning or the astuteness behind those words that day, but since then I have come to understand and appreciate the message more than I can adequately express.  From my perspective, the directive "Stay strong" is given out way too often to people who are going through a difficult time.  These days, when I hear that said to someone, I want to ask the person who says those words, "Why?  What is the point?  And, really, what other choice is there?"  Like the meaning behind the words my friend said to me on one of the hardest days of my life, in my opinion, it's ok not to feel that you have to be strong when things are tough.  That's why you have friends, faith, or whatever else gets you through it.  Sometimes being told to "be strong" can put an undue burden on a person, sometimes it sets a goal that is unattainable, and sometimes it sends a message (albeit inadvertent) that the only thing those around the person want to see is him or her, being "strong."  Sometimes it feels better to fall apart for awhile in the midst of tragedy; sometimes doing so enables a person to regroup and to power on.  In any case, I much prefer my friend's message: "Stay strong, or don't!"

I still think about that advice regularly, and when I see or hear things like THIS ...

... it makes me want to respond by saying, "You can do both: you can smile and cry, hurt that he's gone and be happy that he was here at all, feel pain and sorrow and still cherish his memory.  You don't have to choose just one or the other."

The second piece of advice that I found most helpful was given more as a piece of information than advice, and it was actually said to me by two different people at two different times; the first person said it to me just after my dad had been diagnosed with cancer.  She had been through a cancer diagnosis and treatment with one of her parents and wanted to share her observation about how she and the other adult children in her family had handled things in distinct ways.  I thought back to her words many times while Dad was sick, not just in relation to how differently my siblings and I were trying to cope but to how every person in the family had his or her own role in helping and his or her own way of getting through to the next day.

After Dad went on ahead, the grief counselor that I went to had me do an exercise in which I was to draw a flower with petals on it and then write on each petal a different role that various people were playing to help me get through the grief process.  She gave an example of "This person listens when I talk about my dad," "This person takes some of the work load off me by doing chores I don't feel up to doing," and "This person lets me cry without asking me what's wrong."  Writing it out helped to remind me that people around me cared and were trying to help in their own way and that no one way was "better" than another.