Grief and Loss

I’ve been listening to Anderson Cooper’s All There Is podcast again. It seems I come and go from this show, dipping my toe (and my ears?) into the subject of grief in fits and starts. I guess it's a subject I don’t want to dwell on too long.

Through therapy, I’ve been learning not just about my responses to trauma and how they have shaped my life, but about the many losses associated with family trauma and how they need to be mourned.

In his podcast, Cooper talks with a variety of people – mostly famous celebrities or authors – who have experienced profound losses, primarily the deaths of loved ones. I’ve been considering the toll un-mourned losses can take on us, when we bury our grief and avoid our very natural pain.

I’ve been re-thinking the idea of “loss” in a more global sense, not just through death. For example, I lost my father, or maybe the ideal of what I needed in a father, because of his abuse and – ultimately – my parents’ divorce. I lost my mother years before her death, through her emotional unavailability and denial of the reality around her. I lost my stepfather when he rejected and criticized me for years. I’ve lost my oldest sister due to her alcohol-induced dementia and, before that, her addiction.

I’m wondering how the grief of “losing” a person, while they’re still in your life, is different from the pain of the death of a loved one. Is it any easier or harder to reconcile the loss of a person through their choices and their behavior, rather than their physical death?

I don’t have answers to these questions, and maybe they’re not that important. Perhaps the bigger truth at play here is that these are, indeed, their own kinds of “deaths.” The deaths of our hopes, dreams, wishes, and expectations. The deaths of relationships that weren’t what they could have been. Even the death of our own innocence.

This is what’s on my mind these days, as I listen to grief stories on Cooper’s podcast and others.

Recently, listeners called in to offer their ideas for managing their way through grief and to share how they have managed to survive – and even learn from – the losses they have experienced. Two ideas from these calls stood out to me.

The first was the concept that grief is a process that takes as long as it takes. There is no standard amount of time it takes to “get over” a loss, and, in fact, most losses are not “gotten over” at all. The feelings merely change in magnitude and shape over time. When I apply this thought to a myriad of losses in my own life, it helps me accept the many years it has taken to work through the various layers of grief each holds.

The second concept was about coping with what’s left unresolved with important people in our lives who have died. For me, much was left unsettled with my mother. When she died, over three decades ago, I was certain she had left me a letter telling me all the things I wanted and needed to hear: That she loved me. That she knew things could have been different, or better. That she was sorry.

I waited for this phantom letter to be discovered for years. It didn’t exist.

One caller had a similar experience and had an interesting suggestion: Write the letter your mom would have written, had she been able to do so. Tell yourself the things you wanted to hear from her, regardless of how many years have passed.

I haven’t written that letter yet, but I plan to. I’ll let you know how it goes.