The Loneliest Time

There are many lonely times in life. When you must attend an important function alone and everyone in the room is a stranger. When your problems overwhelm you at three in the morning and there's no one there to hold your hand and say, “It's going to be okay.” Or when the youngest child carries her suitcase out the door to begin her exciting new life in another city.

But perhaps the loneliest time of all comes a few months after the death of someone important in your life. The friends and relatives have all returned to their homes and their lives. The thank-you notes for funeral flowers have been sent, the bills have been paid and insurance papers filed. The mailbox is no longer jammed with condolence cards. Even your minister no longer visits, busy as he is with people with more recent needs.

You looked forward to this time when all the dust settled and you would have a chance to relax and breathe. Yet you find you are anything but relaxed. You functioned fine through all the hoopla but now you feel lost and alone. You have a huge hole in your heart and your life, filled with the pain and grief of loss. Just when most of your “support system” has concluded you need to “move on”.

We live in a society that poorly understands the grief process even though we all experience it. We say a person is doing well if she doesn't cry even though the toxic tears of grief need to come out. We say someone is having a pity party when they express their feelings even though that is the only road to healing. And we encourage them to “move on” within weeks or, at most, months when a normal grief period following an important loss is at least one to two years.

This premature withdrawal of support is important. It may convince the griever he should, as Archie Bunker used to tell Edith, stifle. Holding in the powerful feelings of the grief process ~ at best ~ delays healing. More commonly, the stress of burying these emotions does significant physical or emotional damage.

So, if society is wrong about the way we should grieve, what is the “right” way? Of course, because we all are individuals, there is no “one size fits all”. But there are some tasks we need to accomplish as we travel through the grief process.

First, we must accept that this person is truly gone. This isn't as easy as it sounds. Even if the death was expected, we spend the first days or even weeks in shock. We may worry that our loved one is cold in the grave or pretend the person has left on an extended vacation. This shock is actually helpful while we try to get the funeral arrangements out of the way and deal with insurance companies. It helps us keep our cool in complicated circumstances. But this protective denial must be given up in order to move toward actual healing.

Most people don't realize that the most powerful grief feelings don't hit us until two or three months after the death. For some, it is even later. This is when the anger, sadness, fear, anxiety or guilt feel almost out of control. Some people experience many of these feelings; others have one or another (for example, anger or guilt) as their “grief style”. The key is that these feelings need to be felt and expressed in order to get past them. If we push the feelings down, they will just stay buried until, at a weak moment, they explode. Nothing has been accomplished and the explosion itself may cause further difficulties. How much better to get these hard feelings out through talking to a trusted friend or writing in a journal.

Along the way, we learn a great deal. We learn who we are without this person in our lives. (Sometimes this can be a pleasant surprise as it was for the widower who learned he was a better cook than his wife, who hadn't allowed him to darken the kitchen door!) We learn who we can count on and, sadly, who “isn't there” for us when times are tough. We learn how strong and resourceful we can be when the chips are down. And we learn how to make good things come out of something so painful when we “pay it forward” by raising money for cancer research or offer support to another in similar circumstances.

Certainly, the loneliest months of our lives may come following the death of a dear one. But, when we understand what we need, we can grieve and grow toward a brilliant and breaking dawn.