Joanne Cacciatore: Joining Hands

This is one chapter from Bearing the Unbearable that I am called to share. This little book is comprised of 52 short chapters and is among the best that I have read on grief. May we all find the wise support that we need to heal our hearts, become increasingly and wholly human, and be mindful of both the need to hold ourselves with compassion and also of the need to continue to reach out our hands and hearts to others who are suffering loss. We are all related, all family, all need each other. 🙏💗 Molly

Joining Hands

 

Many people ask of those who are grieving: "Are you still feeling so sad?" "How long will you be feeling so sad?" "What can we do to stop you from feeling so sad?"

The thing about grief is that there isn't a place or time at which we arrive once-and-for-all at peace, or healing, or completion.

Grief is a process, an unending long and winding road. The landscape changes as we travel the distance, some parts of the path barren and some more beautiful ― but it's the same road. And grief itself is the destination: at every moment of our grief, we are arriving.

But so many of us receive the antithetical message from within medical, spiritual, educational, and social systems that grief is pathological, a condition to be treated, cured, and eradicated. These messages from a compassion-deficient culture, explicit or tacitly embedded into the appraisal of normative grief, inform and influence our relationship to bereavement. This is one of the greatest challenges to the bereaved.

Our culture is rife with platitudes, psychologically imperialistic idioms, that propagate its understanding of grief. Some of these will sound familiar to any griever:

• "S/he is in a better place.
• "S/he isn't suffering anymore.
• "Everything happens for a reason." 
• "It's time to move on, to move forward."
• "It's not normal to feel that way."
• "Grieving can easily become a mental disorder."
• "Your (child, parent, spouse, grandparent, etc.) wouldn't want you to be sad."
• "I can't believe you are still feeling grief." 
• "Maybe you should get on some medication."
• "Shouldn't you feel better by now?"
• "It's not normal to hurt for this long."
• "You can have other children."
• "You have to forget this."
• "Trust in God's plan."
• "Just let go."
• "God needed an angel to tend His garden."
• "Try (this therapy, that technique) to help you heal." 
• "Don't think about it."
• "Just think happy thoughts."
• "Try to remember the good times."
• "Don't think about the bad times."
• "Just replace the hard memories with good ones."
• "You have to get back to life."

Other members of grief-denying culture, fearful that the emotional contagion of grief will expose them to their own pain, try to justify their avoidance and defend themselves from the unthinkable. They try to fix grief ― my friend and renowned psychotherapist Dr. Robert Stolorow calls this "the War on Grief." 

 

Other children or remarriage will not cure this.

It is normal to feel this way and for this long.

And there is no "better place" for those we love than with us.

Grief cannot, and should not, be fixed.

 

Our culture is terrified by powerful expression of painful emotions and so uses its institutions and agencies to quell grief, to force people into dark corners of hiding, to silence grieving wails with pills, to forcibly calm and control that which should not be controlled. It uses its platitudes to perpetuate myths and misinformation about what is normal in grieving, and the temptation to move away from our own suffering is real and seemingly sensible to some. 

 

Yet there is no place for the tidy, the neat, or the civilized in mourning.

 

Grief violates convention: it is raw, primal, seditious, chaotic, writhing, and most certainly uncivilized. Yet grief is an affirmation of human passion, and only those who are apathetic, who stonewall love, and who eschew intimacy can escape grief's pull. 

 

No intervention and no interventionist can "cure" our grief. And we are not broken ― we are brokenhearted. 

 

Grief is not a medical disorder to be cured.

Grief is not a spiritual crisis to be resolved.

Grief is not a social woe to be addressed.

Grief is, simply, a matter of the heart ― to be felt. 

 

As the Kotzker Rebbe, a nineteenth-century Hasidic rabbi, said: "There is no heart more whole than a broken one."

 

― Joanne Cacciatore

 From Bearing the Unbearable: Love, Loss, and

the Heartbreaking Path of Grief

https://www.amazon.com/Bearing-Unbearable-Love-Heartbreaking-Grief/dp/1614292965