I wish my mother had had a better guide through a sudden loss when she was nine. She woke up to find that her mother, who slept beside her, had stopped breathing, her body gone cold in the night. They buried her that day. There was no time to mourn, and all the years I knew her, my mother struggled with unresolved grief. She immediately took on the responsibility of caring for her younger siblings and cooking for the family, watching her father turn to alcohol to dull his pain and loneliness. By the time she married and became a mother herself, her grief had calcified, the shock and sorrow of her early loss tight around her like a cage. She hung a portrait of her mother on the wall above the piano and talked to it as she went about her chores. In the soundtrack of my childhood, my sister Klara practices violin, and my mother begs her dead mother for help and strength. Her grief seemed like a fourth child, in need of constant tending. It’s good to feel all the aspects of grief—sadness, anger, powerlessness. But my mother got stuck there.
When we have unresolved grief, we often live with overwhelming rage.
Lorna had a brother who drank a lot. One night he went for a walk and was hit by a car and died. A year later, she is struggling to accept that he’s gone. “I told him and told him not to drink!” she says. “Why didn’t he listen? He was supposed to help me take care of our mother. How could he be so selfish?” She can’t change that he was addicted to alcohol, that he kept right on drinking despite his family’s best efforts to intervene, that he was inebriated when he died. She can’t change a thing—and it’s hard to accept our powerlessness.
When my grandchildren were young, a schoolmate was riding his bike one afternoon when he cut in front of traffic and died. Marianne was asked to talk to his classmates, to help them process all the complex feelings that come with loss—the way it forces us into a reckoning with our own mortality, with the fragility of life. She came prepared to address their sadness and fear. But the students’ overwhelming response to the tragedy wasn’t sorrow. It was guilt. “I could have been nicer to him,” they said. “He could have been at my house instead of riding his bike alone, but I never wanted to invite him over.” The students enumerated all the ways they might have prevented the boy’s death. By holding themselves responsible, they were seeking control. But as long as they continued to blame themselves, they’d be avoiding their grief.
We don’t have control, but we wish we did.
Resolving grief means both to release ourselves from responsibility for all the things that weren’t up to us, and to come to terms with the choices we’ve made that can’t be undone.
Marianne helped the children name all the decisions that weren’t in their control: the boy’s choice to ride his bike that day, the route he took, what he was or wasn’t paying attention to when he rode off the curb into the street, what the driver of the car was or wasn’t paying attention to as she moved into the intersection. And she helped them face their remorse for choices they had made: the sleepovers and birthday parties they hadn’t invited the boy, the teasing remarks, the times they’d laughed or stayed silent when he was the butt of a prank. This is the work we get to do in the present: to grieve what happened or didn’t happen, to own up to what we did or didn’t do, and to choose our response now. Being more attuned to how their behavior might hurt or marginalize others wasn’t going to bring their classmate back. But they could embrace the opportunity to become more aware—to act with greater kindness and compassion.
It’s so hard to be where we are, in the present. To accept what was and is, and move on. For twenty years, my patient Sue has come to see me every year around the anniversary of her son’s death. When he was twenty-five, he shot himself with the gun she kept in her bedside table. He’s been dead now almost as long as he was alive, and she’s still healing, still trapped sometimes in the unrelenting eddy of guilt. Why did I own a gun? Why didn’t I secure it properly? Why did I allow him to find it? Why was I so unaware of his depression and troubles? She can’t seem to forgive herself.
Of course, she wishes he hadn’t died. She longs to erase all the factors, large and small, that may have contributed to his death. But her son didn’t end his life because she owned a gun. He didn’t kill himself because of anything she did or didn’t do.
But as long as she stays in guilt, she doesn’t have to acknowledge that he died. As long as she can blame herself, she doesn’t have to accept what he chose to do. If he could see her suffering now, he would probably say, “Mom, I was going to kill myself anyway. I didn’t want you to die with me.”
It’s good to keep crying for those we’ve lost, to keep feeling the ache, to let ourselves be in the sorrow and accept that it’s not ever going to go away. I was invited to speak at a support group for grieving parents where they shared memories and pictures, cried together, showed up for each other. It was beautiful to witness this connected and supportive way of living grief.
I also noticed some ways I could guide them toward greater freedom within their grief. For example, they began the meeting by going around in a circle
