Wednesday, December 8, 2010
The Lonely Journey of Grief, Part 8 of 15
IDEA: Friends can help sufferers in the crucible of grief.
PURPOSE: To help helpers understand how to help those who suffer in the crucible of grief.
Grief is a process of realization, that is, of “making real” the fact of loss. This process takes time and, while it can be assisted, anything that forces reality-testing in the early period of bereavement is likely to give rise to difficulties. Premature confrontations can cause panic reactions, a massive shutting off of emotion and/or the repetitious reliving of the traumatic experiences.
Without pressing the bereaved person to deal prematurely with the loss, what specific things can we do during this crucible stage to help grief sufferers actualize their loss?
We can be there.
Immediately after a death, sympathy and help flow like a river. But a month, two months, six months later, loneliness and loss make their strongest impact. Friends are needed more than ever during those months when others have forgotten what the grief sufferer can never forget.
Late afternoons and evenings are particularly difficult. Thoughtful friends extend dinner invitations.
We can show concern by providing a ride to church or to a shopping center, or taking a child who has lost a parent to a circus or a ballgame. It can be cutting the grass or shoveling snow to ease the burden of the sufferer. Including sufferers on the guest list for a dinner party is especially welcome for widows.
The person who is most valued during the crucible stage is not the one who expresses the most sympathy, but the one who “sticks around,” quietly being there and doing what needs to be done.
We can listen.
The grieving person often wants to talk about memories or simply sit with a good friend. Encourage sufferers to express their feelings and memories when they want to.
We may suggest useful books.
Choose these books with care, especially if you haven’t sat where the grieving person sits. Many “Christian” books on grief are platitudinous and vacuous: they may do more harm than good. Some Christian writers promote a “Christian” stoicism that turns grief into bad grief by damming up emotions and honest thoughts.
Weep with those who weep.
It is sometimes reassuring to a bereaved person when those who are closest allow their own feelings of sadness to emerge. These communal expressions of sorrow make the bereaved person feel understood and reduce the sense of isolation often felt.
The helper who cries also shows, in revealing their own feelings, that they are not ashamed of those feelings or rendered useless by them. If we’re shamed by our tears with a grieving person, we won’t help the bereaved do grief work.
Don’t express pity.
Pity makes the bereaved person into an object. In being pitied, the bereaved person becomes pitiful. Pity puts the bereaved person at a distance from, and in an inferior position to, the would-be comforter. Get conventional verbal expressions of sympathy over as quickly as possible and speak from the heart or not at all. Trite formula serve only to widen the gap between the bereaved and non-bereaved.
In general, the helper should not “pluck at the heartstrings” of the bereaved person until breakdown occurs any more than he or she should connive with the bereaved in endless attempts to avoid grief work. Both probing and “jollying along” are unhelpful. The task of the bereaved person is painful and difficult, and it can be neither avoided nor hurried along.
