Ask not what disease the person has, but rather what person the disease has. — William Osler
Grief, of course, isn’t a disease.
It is a painful passage, though; and it disturbs the normal flow of our days, and unsettles us, and thus is a sort of dis-ease. And if there is one thing about which all grief counselors and theorists agree, it’s that there is no single “best” way to grieve. There is only each person’s winding path.
We naturally want some benchmarks on any journey. That is why humans, especially past a certain age, are inveterate listmakers, because we want a way to chart our progress. Right now, Susan and I are working through our wedding preparation checklist, which is actually getting done in a timely manner, though it doesn’t always feel like it. A number of items are marked on my spreadsheet as “in process”, though some (like “create a spreadsheet”) can be confidently labeled “done!” There is a sense of security and stability in knowing that baby steps accumulate, and that small and simple things done each day lead to massive transformation in the end.
But with grief, there is no checklist. At first (as for me three years ago) the goal is simply to survive, to make it through each day. One has to lower one’s expectations dramatically, and celebrate tiny victories like getting out of bed or brushing one’s teeth. (On especially difficult days I would only brush every other tooth, but I am something of a contrarian.) Later on, I found myself able to find new though largely artificial routines, like walking every day at a park, that gave my life some needed structure and order. I made sure to do some things that were edifying to me each day, which for me included writing and fussing over the cats. Still later, I regained a sense of mission and purpose in my life, and as I did, my psychological time horizon broadened from hours to days to weeks to months.
But there was no timeline.
Even after Susan and I became a serious couple (though, in a paradox, we laugh much), it took some months for me to figure out (or to be shown) how to honor Diane’s memory and legacy while also celebrating my new love. I have that down now, but it wasn’t like flipping a switch. Most change, such as night turning into day, is gradual and even fractal; instants of dramatic metamorphosis, though they do occur, are few. Usually, we don’t realize we are changing until we look back and realize, with a shock, that we have changed. There is an inflection point, but we can’t always reliably identify precisely when it occurred.
And because everything we experience, including grief and loss, gets filtered through our internal master narrative and our mental grid of beliefs and values and priorities and commitments, and seasoned by our innate temperament, no two people can possibly come to faith, or fall in love, or grieve a loss in precisely the same way. God never sends in the clones, and there will never again be another you — a strong argument for your irreplaceability. Funerals and memorial services are often dominated by the relating of stories about the one who has died, because they are about celebrating uniqueness. Yet these stories have value because they are shared, so it’s important to recognize that we need to balance the need for individuality with the need for connection and community. “Hi, I’m Marlowe. And you are?” “Somebody else.”
So I’ve come to think that we need to give each other some slack (originally a nautical metaphor) when it comes to how we work through our challenges and navigate our journeys. When a person seems to be floundering, they may simply be taking a route that is different from yours. Let others be who they are, and give yourself the same privilege, as you live suspended between shame and glory. Know that healing does come, in its time, in the kairos, and you can’t always anticipate when or how it will arrive. And, as Lily Tomlin once noted, you might as well be yourself — everyone else is already taken.
We all live in a world of our own.