Tonight's picture was taken in January of 2005. Mattie was almost three years old by that point and he was a bundle of energy! If I was in the kitchen, he wanted to be in there too. I was working on the dishes and he was right along side me on the counter supervising the process. He was my trusty sidekick and just by his expression on his face, can't you tell he had big plans for some kind of mischief?
Quote of the day: All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them. ~ Isak Dinesen
Last week over lunch with my friend Annie, she mentioned an article that resonated with her in the New York Times about grief. She asked me if I had seen or read it. I hadn't, which was unfortunate but wanted to track it down. As the week went on, I then received an email from Mattie's head of school, or as my faithful readers know him as...... "the Magic Man." Just so happens Bob sent me the link to the very same article that Annie was talking to me about at lunch. He was curious to know if I had seen the article, because he felt that it discussed many of the issues and feelings I had expressed about grief to him and on the blog. After hearing that, I was even more curious to read the article because with grief I sometimes feel like I STAND ALONE. Like I am the ODD WOMAN OUT. So when there is someone else that is speaking my language, I want to stop and listen.
This article in the New York Times is entitled, Getting Grief Right. What I love about it, besides the fact that it is absolutely SPOT on, is that it is written from the point of view of a parent and a psychotherapist. Dr. O'Malley, through his eloquent writing and insights, is trying to make a case that the long established model held within our society and within the practice of the mental health field needs to be redefined. That mind set believes that there is a finite time line to grief and that timeline follows a degree of intensity. All of which is not helpful in many cases and usually frustrates the griever. Personally in addition to frustrating the griever in some cases what happens is this demand to fit into society and to pretend that everything is fine, to have to put our grief aside because it isn't deemed normal to talk about and we are expected to maintain a cheery and rosy outlook about our future, only sets us up for mental health issues in the future. Particularly for parents who lost a child. They need to talk about their child, they crave to keep their child's memory alive, not to squelch these thoughts and feelings because it is easier on the world around them. Asking parents to move on, besides being disrespectful has always been extremely counter productive to me in the healing process, and thankfully after reading Dr. O'Malley's article, he confirms my feelings and apparently uses this strategy with his patients.
Mary came to O'Malley after seeing two other therapists for grief. Those other therapists were not a good match for her. She instead came to see O'Malley because she heard that he lost a child and therefore she felt he would understand how she felt and knew he had a track record for helping others with grief. Instead of talking about her grief symptoms he did something very different. He spoke to her about her child, a very novel approach for her!
The article discussed the frustration and feelings of being pent up with grief and trying to figure out why as grievers we aren't further along in the grieving process. In essence why aren't we over it!!! Why hasn't the sadness lifted?! Why haven't we been able to move on???!! In fact if you talk to anyone who is grieving these are the questions you hear from ALL of us!!! Guess why we are asking these questions????? Certainly we ask these questions because grief is painful and we don't like living with this pain, but the other reason why we ask these questions of ourselves is because we know we stand out in society! We know we don't fit in and people view us as different. O'Malley believes that sadness is a measure of the love and attachment lost. Certain bonds and degrees of attachment mean certain things to us and when they are lost they impact our lives significantly, they affect our identity, our meaning in life, and our emotional connections. He refers to this as the chapter 1 in the story of loss.
The chapter 3 in his story of loss also resonated with me because this chapter has to do with the long road ahead. In many ways it is a lifetime of grief. The question is how to survive it? This is when people stop asking you how you are doing. This time period differs for everyone. For some people the support and concern ends in days, some it is weeks, and for some it is the first year. Whenever it happens it is devastating because the question becomes..... how can I manage this alone? Has everyone forgotten? Their lives have moved on, and in our case, I see that their children are still growing and developing, but for me, I still lost mine. This is a hard road paved with mixed emotions, not always pretty emotions to come to terms with.
I am squarely in chapter 3, and like O'Malley has pointed out, I realize closure isn't possible and I have stopped looking for it, for myself and certainly from other people. I have accepted that and what I love about his article is how he ends it with the profound quote..... “All sorrows can be borne if you put them in a story or tell a story about them." I think this is maybe why I continue to write the blog (I'm telling Mattie and our story daily - I'm keeping the "sacred" bond between Mattie and I alive!) and also maybe why O'Malley recommends people seek support groups. Groups (though they don't work for everyone) enable us to continue to tell our story, to keep our loved one's memory alive, and in essence as long as we do that on some level that person never dies for us. The bond isn't broken. When articles like this are published it really does normalize grief for all of us, because so many of us struggle and hide behind a facade of trying to look normal and behave in a society which can't possibly handle the painful realities of life's circumstances.
Getting Grief Right
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2015/01/10/getting-grief-right/?_r=0
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