I'm back after a wonderful holiday break. I've finally finished draft one of a completed manuscript and have sent it off to an editor for feedback. In the meantime, I'll continue to explore the ideas I touch upon in the memoir in this blog. Today's post is about how differences in the way we grieve can lead to misunderstandings. Enjoy.
We all handle grief in our own unique ways. The trick is to respect — not judge — the path of others.
I just finished reading Joyce Carol Oates’ book “Carthage.” It’s not a great book and I almost put it down before I finished, but I plugged away and in the last couple of chapters found an interesting message that was worth my perseverance.
The book is about the disappearance of a young woman. Her family believes she is dead, and her sister’s ex-fiance — an Iraqi vet who returned from the war seriously maimed and suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome — confesses to having murdered her, although there is no body. Ultimately (spoiler alert) it turns out the girl did not die, she just disappeared for seven years.
For her family, however, her disappearance was a death, and they were left grieving and confused.
What I found most interesting about the book was the way the girl’s parents dealt with their tragedy. The mother is forgiving and dedicates her life to battered women issues. She visits the ex-fiance in prison and offers him her support and love. The father, on the other hand, drinks heavily, struggles with his anger and is left isolated and kind of pathetic. He’s angry and unforgiving. The couple divorces, estranged by their different ways of coping with the loss of their daughter.
I remember hearing that as many as 75 percent of couples who lose a child end up divorcing. After reading Oates’ book, I did a little bit of Internet searching to try to find whether that statistic was true. The information I tracked down was scanty, but most of it debunked the notion that the loss of a child doomed couples. Nonetheless the myth persists. We accept it as fact without really questioning where the idea comes from. It seems for most of us, it makes sense that the death of a child would be more than enough to rupture the bond between a couple, regardless of whether there is any supporting evidence for that belief.
Grief is different for all of us. We don’t really know how we’ll respond to the loss of a loved one until it happens. Most deaths are accompanied by sadness, disbelief, fear and anger. How we cope with these emotions is intensely personal, and it can be difficult when you find yourself responding very differently from your partner, friends and family. You may look at someone you have known your whole life and see a person you do not recognize and cannot reach. How can he or she be so forgiving when you are filled with rage? How can he or she find solace in religion when your beliefs have been shattered by the brutality of life? How can you be so different in your response?
It’s hard to get into someone else’s head. Think about pain. You can see someone is suffering, but you cannot feel what they are feeling and that disconnect can make it hard to empathize. There’s a video on YouTube about the "man cold" that I find hilarious because I believe my husband is a bit melodramatic when he gets a sore throat or fever. But the fact is I can’t really feel his cold or know how it makes him feel, so my lack of sympathy is really pretty harsh. Watching someone else grieve is similar. I know people thought I should let go of my anger, but from my perspective their judgment reflected their inability to understand how I felt.
Facing that disconnect can be difficult. It’s hard not to question the choices of someone who has taken a different route from the path you’ve chosen. In “Carthage,” it was easy to be sympathetic toward the mother. She appeared noble, self-sacrificing and forgiving and that looked good, at least on paper. The drunken father, on the other hand, looked pathetic and ridiculous as he clung to his anger. It made me think about my own difficulty letting go. How much more sympathetic I would be if I chose to be noble and forgiving. But how unnatural that emotion seemed to be for me.
I find myself thinking about this difference in perspective and reflecting on how easy it makes it to judge someone harshly from the outside and how challenging that could be to a relationship if you find yourself on opposites sides. How do you find commonality if one person is angry and bitter and the other forgiving? How do you reach each other if one person finds solace in religion and the other gets angry at the idea of God for the sorrow he or she must endure?
Outside magazine ran an article on Pete’s death in December 2007. The online version of the story was accompanied by a comment section where people could post their reactions to the story. To solicit responses, Outside posed a question about whether Luke Rodolph should have faced charges for his actions. Some of the comments posted on that site shocked me. More than one person judged me harshly for my anger, calling Luke a hero. I can recall vividly one particular comment where an unnamed person wrote: “Absolon and her friends should be ashamed for their failure to forgive.”
Those kinds of remarks blew me away. How, I thought, could anyone feel they had the right to judge me based on one article? How could they judge my community based on one reporter’s interpretation of our response to our loss? And yet people — especially with the protection of anonymity — found it easy to say we needed to forgive.
In the abstract I agree forgiveness is a worthy goal and the more admirable way to respond to a wrong. But I am not sure you can always predict how you or your loved one will react to the same crisis, demanding or expecting forgiveness in another shows, in my mind, a lack of awareness about our basic human differences. And if you want to avoid having that difference rupture a long-lasting relationship you need to step back and accept it without judgment. You need to support each other on your separate journeys and acknowledge with love and respect the fact that all of us react in our own unique ways.